


Teatime with Jane

by Skairunner



Series: Teatime Universe [1]
Category: EVE Online, Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe, Explicit Language, F/M, Mind Control, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Science Fiction, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-01-31 21:22:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 46,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12690465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skairunner/pseuds/Skairunner
Summary: The Protectorate is in its final days. The Imperial Union on one side and the dozens of squabbling warlords on the other would be enough to give any empire pause, but gigantic automaton-ships, Endbringers, regularly attack and often wipe out planets. Were it not for the efforts of captains with 'talents' or 'specialities', which allowed them to modify starships and fly them better than a non-talented person, the Protectorate (and the Imperial Union) would've been long gone by now.In the midst of this all, Dennis Hill, captain of theTemporary Obstruction, has a chance encounter that has much more significance than it appears.





	1. Teatime with Jane 1

Cover art by [babylonsheep](http://lonsheep.deviantart.com/) and gifted by profHoyden. 

* * *

 

 

The Protectorate was in its final days.

But the captain of the _Temporary Obstruction_ , Dennis Hill, was only peripherally aware of the goings-on of the Protectorate. The ship he piloted, a run-of-the-mill combat cruiser, wasn’t the kind to be deployed against the Imperial Union or be called for front-line duty against the Endbringers. Even so, he had been in an Endbringer fight once, when he was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

_Align! Align, align, god dammit align!_

The last words of his fleet leader, Rory Christner, still haunted him. Every ship had to accelerate in the right direction before entering faster-than-lightspeed warp. The _Triumph Against All Odds_ , battlecruiser, had still been rotating towards her escape vector when the eleven foot projectile from the _Leviathan_ had impacted.

As if in slow motion, the _Triumph_ had snapped in two as _Obstruction_ escaped into warp.

Dennis shook his head, stepping into the dark observation lounge of his ship. There were no Endbringers here. Just a mundane escort from one edge of the Protectorate to the other, straight through warlord space. Not the _safest_ route to take, but it saved weeks of time, and the odds were low that they would be caught. They were carrying three barges worth of supplies, and one Protectorate spook. Nothing more. Jane Lastname—she had refused to provide a last name, so Dennis had given her one—was framed by the view of the hazy warp tunnel, through which he could see the slow parallax of the stars. Before he could announce his presence, Jane spoke up. She was always so eerily alert.

“Hello there, Captain.”

She twisted around, dark curly hair scattering across her shoulders. Dennis could barely make out her face, though when he looked into her eyes, it almost seemed as if they shined. Trick of the light?

“Tea?” she offered. He thought she was smiling.

Dennis cleared his throat. “As I promised yesterday.” He walked to the three seat couch. Jane scooted over to the left cushion, setting the laptop she had been using on the floor, and Dennis rounded the armrest and sat on the right one. There was a small folding table with a glass teapot and two ceramic cups set on it. One was already half-full. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me your real name today?”

“It’s still classified, Captain,” Jane said. “And I am not at liberty to disclose anything to you. Or anyone.” She leaned over to pour the tea.

“I had to try,” Dennis said. He watched the reddish liquid fill his cup.

“No,” she said softly, “you didn’t.”

Dennis glanced at her, but she didn’t seem annoyed. Jane was not her real name—anyone could’ve guessed that—but even his orders had only said ‘Protectorate personnel.’ She didn’t dress smartly enough to be a general or admiral—brass types wore immaculately pressed and ironed shirts and slacks, and also usually had an attaché when traveling. But she had muscle tone, and she was also intelligent, or so he had gathered from yesterday’s tea time. Her word choice, in particular. Maybe she was a tactician or from Intelligence.

Jane was also more than happy enough to enjoy the silence. She was gazing out the window at the angular, lithe form of _New Vistas_ , the other military ship in his convoy. A destroyer.

“The tea’s good,” he tried. She smiled.

“Yeah, it’s good, isn’t it? I’m sad that I don’t have much of it left, though.”

“Why’s that?”

Jane looked out the window. “It’s from New Yunnan.”

“Oh?” Dennis frowned.

“New Yunnan,” Jane recited solemnly. “Target of Endbringer _Baalzevul_. Deep Imperial Union space. They refused our assistance.”

Although the Imperial Union had declared victory, even in their propaganda reels it had been too easy to spot the twisted, burnt-out hulk of the New Yunnan station and its attendant shipyards.

The Protectorate’s own sources had told them that the New Yunnan system had been declared off-limits for civilian traffic by the Imperial Union. A much nicer way of saying that the planet was lost, as were all of its inhabitants who hadn’t evacuated in time.

Found footage from planets ruined by Endbringers showed what happened to lost planets.

Dennis remembered the image of a planet on fire. Artillery raining from the sky. Artillery… The _Leviathan_ preferred kinetic weaponry. He remembered seeing the shadow of the _Leviathan_ drifting lazily towards the dreadnought _Tower of Alexandria_. He remembered the constant irregular patter of shells on his ship’s hull—the blaring, urgent HULL BREACH klaxon sounding twice and the sound of someone’s screaming, and engines struggling to _move,_ shoving him back in his chair as the capacitors exploded with the strain, gyros maxing out, barely dodging another barrage from Leviathan’s point defense and watching from afar as the _Triumph_ folded into an expanding shell of debris, slipping, slipping away...

He started, feeling a hand on his arm. Jane was looking at him concernedly. “You weren’t responding,” she said.

“Flashbacks,” he offered weakly. He gulped at his tea. The warm feeling didn’t touch the cold pit in his stomach.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.” She hesitated, then let go of his arm. She brushed some of her hair over her ear. “Have more tea?”

Dennis nodded. She poured more. Maybe she thought of saying something, but she closed her mouth and turned away. When had she come so close? She was sitting on the middle cushion now.

An awkward silence descended, Jane looking out the window, Dennis staring into the depths of his cup. The tea cooled.

“I think you need to talk about it to someone,” Jane finally said. Dennis looked up, and found himself pinned by Jane’s look. “I got the gist of it, though.”

What? He opened his mouth to express that thought, but Jane pressed on.

“You weren’t supposed to be in that fight, were you? The _Obstruction_ is only a cruiser. It can’t do anything against _Leviathan_ except be fodder.”

Dennis froze.

“You lost a friend there, but got out yourself. You were _there_ when they died. Maybe you think it’s your fault. And since the Protectorate is the second-largest group of dumbasses around, of course you slipped through the cracks. Didn’t get proper therapy after the battle.” Her look was challenging. _Tell me I’m wrong_ , it said. And none of it was.

She looked angry, too, but not at him.

But he felt his heartbeat rise as he was reminded yet again of the shadow—

Then she shook him. She was a _lot_ stronger than she looked. “Stop that!”

“Stop what?” He was bewildered and more than a little disoriented.

“Whatever. What you were just thinking about.”

Dennis sputtered. “How the hell do you know—”

“Trust me, I do.” She shook him a little more. “I’m not a therapist, but I know that something that helps is to know when you’re thinking about _it_ and just… stop. _Make_ yourself stop.”

Dennis averted his eyes from hers. Jane let go, and sunk into the middle cushion again. She picked up her cup.

“I’m sorry for pushing it,” she said, sounding embarrassed. “But I meant what I said.”

“Thanks,” he said. He meant it, too. “Don’t be sorry, you did it for my own good.” He glanced at her.

She was practically hiding behind her cup.

…Was she blushing?

“I was channeling a… a friend,” she said at length.

“Sounds like a nice person.”

Jane giggled. “No, that’s about the last word I’d use to describe her. But she has her heart in the right place. When I first met her…”

The room was still only lit by the stars outside, but it felt less dark, somehow, as they talked.

* * *

Perhaps one day he would figure out how Jane did it. As soon as he had stepped inside, Jane had risen to greet him. He had taken off his boots before coming to the observation lounge this time, but it hadn’t helped.

Jane was quite tall. Taller than Dennis was, with long legs that reminded him of a runner… or a model. She moved gracefully.

“Hello, Captain Hill. I was about to get the tea,” she said, smiling.

Dennis snorted. “Hey there, Jane Lastname.”

Her smile turned into a grin.

“That won’t make me tell you my last name, you know.” She walked over to the water dispenser and crouched, filling the glass teapot with hot water.

“You know how it goes,” Dennis said. He drifted towards the couch. “And please, call me Dennis.”

“Sure thing, Captain Dennis,” she said. He could tell she was teasing him. Her tone couldn’t be interpreted as anything but. He heard a soft whirring sound as Jane walked back to the couch.

“What’s that noise?”

Jane raised an eyebrow. She pointed. Dennis turned to look at the laptop she had abandoned on the leftmost seat.

“A laptop?”

“A laptop.” The color of the water was changing already, to a pale yellow. Some of the tea leaves swirled in the pot, still. She set the pot down on the folding table.

“No, I mean… why a laptop? Don’t most people prefer pads? They’re light and have a touch screen.”

“Consider me a traditionalist.” She gently closed the lid of the laptop. “How’s the day going?”

“It’s the third day of the trip,” Dennis said. “Everything’s going just fine. Warp bubble’s solid and nobody got lost.” He paused. “Which would be really bad.” If one of the barges were to slip out of the shared warp bubble, they would have to immediately stop warp and wait until they could pick up the rescue beacon signal. Delay aside, there was always the chance that an Undersiders ship would find the barge first.

“That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one,” Jane said, with a knowing laugh. She stretched, arms above her, before sitting down on the middle seat next to him. Dennis was aware of that quiet whir again. “Never good to be broadcasting a signal that says ‘Hello friends, I am here, please come save me,’ when you’re in warlord space.”

Dennis shuddered. “I would hate to be caught by the Undersiders. Especially, ahh, what was her name… You know, the cyborg captain of the drone ship?” He tried to remember his briefing. They had been informed of the flagships of each of the Undersiders. “The _Monarch_?”

“Taylor Hebert?” Jane had a complicated expression, though overall it was trending towards _amused_. Her eyes caught the whitish blue of the warp tunnel, shone with refracted light.

“Right, her.” Jane’s lips twisted, then she gave up and grinned. Dennis furrowed his brows. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh, I dunno…” She reached over to pour her and Dennis tea.

“Don’t you dare say ‘classified’,” Dennis said sternly. She started laughing. He felt miffed.

She rubbed her eyes, still chuckling. “It’s nothing,” she said.

“I’m alert enough to tell that that’s just a more polite way of saying ‘classified,’” Dennis said. He did not pout, because he was dignified. He wanted to, though.

“You got me, Dennis,” she said. She picked up her cup again.

Dennis sighed. It was his defeat. He couldn’t exactly demand she give up classified info, and she knew it.

A companionable silence fell.

Dennis sipped his own tea. Was this different from yesterday’s? It had a hint of a tang.

He thought about what he had been saying before Jane had started laughing.

“Oh yeah, I was talking about Hebert… You’ve heard of what she’s done, right?”

“You could say that,” Jane said, nodding seriously.

“Her file says that she uses her implants to directly control all her drones,” Dennis continued, “which is why they’re all so much more effective than typical drones. And why she has so many. _Obstruction_ ’s a typical Thorax-class cruiser, she can handle up to ten light drones out at once, or four heavy.” Jane nodded. “ _Monarch_ ’s a cruiser, too, but she’s done something to it. She sends out so many drones...” He shuddered in memory. “She could probably have a hundred light drones out, or more like fifty mixed light, medium and heavy.”

“Why can’t you just shoot them down?” Jane had gone back to looking outside at the ever shifting stars.

“They’re too damn _smart_ is the problem,” Dennis said, groaning. Jane made a suitably commiserating noise. “I sure hope I never meet her.”

“Hey," Jane said, smirking, "A cute captain like you... maybe she'll be like, 'Yeah, have _that_ one bound and taken to my quarters...'"

Dennis laughed. "Me? No way."

Jane pretended to look Dennis over, then broke down into giggles.“You know,” she said after a bit, grinning, “It was kinda cute, seeing you so worked up about something. I didn’t want to tell you that I already knew what the Undersiders do.”

Dennis’s cheeks burned. Right, intelligence officer and/or tactician. Probably. Did he make an idiot of himself? He changed the topic. “So why are you always in the observatory?”

“Mobile phone reception?” She was still grinning. She _knew_.

“I think you need a better excuse than that.”

She shrugged. “It’s basically the only room in this entire ship that’s wide open. My cabin’s claustrophobic. No windows.”

“Yeah, I guess the _Temporary Obstruction_ isn’t exactly a five-star luxury yacht.” He frowned. “I feel the urge to defend the honor of my ship, though.”

Jane made a noise and had more tea. They spent the rest of the hour in relative silence.

When Dennis left, she gave him a hug, saying, “See you tomorrow, Dennis.”

She was warm.

* * *

“I could’ve made this trip in four days on my own,” Missy grumbled.

“Yeah, I don’t envy you,” Dennis said, leaning back in his chair. He grinned at the tiny Missy-image on the screen in front of him. Her medium length blond hair, shaved on one side, filled most of the screen—she was looking at something to the side.

“Stuck in a tiny tin can for an entire week, with just your crewmates to talk to.”

“Someone has to be here to get your slow cruiser-sized ass out of trouble,” Missy replied. Her ship, _New Vistas_ , was a destroyer fit with a special micro-jump-field generator. Its most important function was to shunt other ships around, preferably out of danger. The three barges they were escorting were incredibly slow at sublight speed.

“My ass is perfectly capable, thank you very much.” He checked the time. It was nearing sixteen hundred ship time. “Oh. I gotta go.”

“Where are you going? Your ship isn’t that much bigger.”

“Three times is a lot. And besides, my ship also has one Jane Lastname on it. She’s interesting to talk to.” Dennis leaned forward, letting all four legs of his chair find their place on the floor.

Missy made a face. “That’s the most generic name that I’ve ever heard, Dennis. Right after Agent Smith.”

“Well… the manifest only said ‘Protectorate personnel.’ I had to ask for her name, and she said it was Jane.”

“Sounds sketchy. Well, have fun, I guess.”

Dennis said his goodbyes and left his cabin for the observation lounge, navigating the cramped corridors of the ship with ease that came from familiarity.

* * *

The scene was familiar, now. Jane, her head of long hair silhouetted against the window by which stars endlessly crawled past.

“I took the liberty of guessing when you’d arrive,” Jane said as greeting. True to her word, there was steam escaping in faint wisps from a pot full of red liquid.

“Am I that predictable?”

“I prefer saying that I’m just that good.” She preened. Dennis laughed. She cracked a grin. “Did you know that my name was Taylor?” Jane—Taylor said casually.

Dennis adopted an exaggeratedly shocked pose. “You don’t say?”

She poked him with her elbow. It actually hurt.

“It must be weird having the same name as Hebert,” Dennis said, rubbing his arm.

“Yep,” she said.

“Is your last name Hebert, too?”

“I’m sure you know that answer to that.”

“Classified?”

“Classified.” She tossed her hair. Dennis rolled his eyes. “I wanted to pick your brain about something…” she started.

“Pick away.”

“Do you think that, if all of us together, the Imperial Union and the Protectorate, and the warlords and god knows whatever exists beyond Union space… do you think we could destroy the Endbringers?” She was apologetic when she said that last word, and had put a hand on Dennis’s arm again. “Breathe, Dennis.”

Dennis took a few deep breaths, feeling comforted by her touch.

“I’m sorry—”

Dennis cut her off. “It’s okay. You’re helping.” She nodded.

“I am.” He felt his heart rate slow down. Taylor rubbed his arm soothingly, took a sip of her tea with her left hand.

“Okay. You were saying?”

She repeated her question. Dennis thought it over.

“Maybe,” he said. “It would definitely help if we weren’t all fighting each other, all the damn time.”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Half the time, the heavy hitters like the _Tower of Alexandria_ and the _Eidolon_ are so occupied with spooking the Imperial Union that they can’t show up to an Endbringer attack. And then there’s what happened to New Yunnan.”

“I don’t think it could happen, though…” Dennis tapped his cheek in thought. He noticed that her gaze had sharpened.

“I can’t just stand by and watch humanity tear itself apart,” she said.

“We’re all trying.”

“Not hard enough.” Her words could’ve cut _Temporary Obstruction_ ’s tritanium hull.

“I guess you have an idea?” He wondered just how high up she was in the Protectorate hierarchy.

“Hell _yes_ I do,” she said. She hesitated. “Though, it might be a bit… unorthodox.” Before Dennis could ask what it was, Taylor looked up, at the window. “Is the warp tunnel dissolving?” He looked, too.

It was.

Instead of the flickering, parallel filaments that had comprised the walls of the warp tunnel for the past four days, the tunnel had a distinct narrowing effect. Dennis stumbled out of his seat in alarm.

His communicator crackled on. It was the bridge. “Captain, we’re being pulled out of warp.”

 _Fuck._ The Undersiders?

His heart fell. He fumbled for his communicator. “Roger, I’ll be at the bridge. Do you have a d-scan?” He tapped Taylor’s shoulder and made a “follow” gesture.

The two of them ran towards the bridge at the center of the ship, buried in the part where the armor plating was the thickest.

“Yessir. Looks like two cruisers. One of them is an Onyx. The radar can’t quite get a read on the other. Aaaand one frigate, looks like an interceptor.” Dennis cursed loudly. Taylor looked at him concernedly.

Onyxes were expensive, tough cruisers most notable for their ability to cast gigantic warp interdiction bubbles. If your ship ran into one of them, it was forced out of warp and back into realspace, usually some kilometers into the bubble. Unexpected Onyxes were never good news.

That, and the fact that Brian Laborn of the Undersiders preferred to use an Onyx as his flagship, _Shroud_.

Interceptors, on the other hand, specialized in chasing down, and keeping ships where they were.

“The other cruiser is probably the _Monarch_ ,” Taylor murmured. “It’s heavily modified. D-scan never identifies those correctly.” Dennis repeated what Taylor said to the bridge as he rounded the last corner.

“Report.” Dennis’s tone was curt.

“We’ll be re-entering real-space in thirty seconds, Captain.” That was Lt. Morris at Navigation. Dennis ran to the communications console and hailed _New Vistas_.

“Missy, is your micro jump ready?”

“Yes,” she replied, a touch of irritation in her voice. “It’s been spooling up. Should be able to bump us all out of the bubble”—slang for an interdiction field—“as soon as we land.”

“Lieutenant Sharp,”—communications—“tell the barges we’re going to be MJDing out of the bubble as soon as we land, and to be ready to enter emergency warp.”

All that was left was to wait for the warp tunnel to fully collapse. If _Thorax_ -class cruisers had an exposed bridge, he would’ve stared out the window. Since the _Thorax_ -class was a study in brutal military efficiency and thus had a bridge buried beneath as much armor as the designers could muster, he contented himself by staring at the holographic display in the middle of the bridge.

“Landed,” said Lt. Morris.

Icons appeared on the display.

Clustered in the center—which was _Temporary Obstruction_ —were three blue half-circles for the barges and a triangle with a line under for _New Vistas_. The interceptor, a red triangle, was twenty kilometers off _New Vistas_ —and was apparently named _Right Behind You Totally Not Imp’s Ship Thing Fucker-Upper_. It was making a beeline at _Vistas_.

Fifty kilometers off from the _Imp_ was the dreaded _Monarch_ , a red pentagon, which was already bleeding drones and filling the space around it with red crosshair icons. Nearly two hundred kilometers away sat the _Shroud_ , casting its warp interdiction field.

“Lock up the ‘ceptor and as many of _Monarch_ ’s drones as you can,” Dennis ordered. He watched anxiously as a cone formed in front of _New Vistas_ , indicating that it was starting its micro-jump.

“Fuck!” _New Vistas_ broadcasted. “I’m scrammed.” The warp scrambler that the interceptor was equipped with prevented ships from entering warp by disturbing its warp core—and knocked micro-jump-drives out of commission. Was it luck that the interceptor was waiting so close to where _New Vistas_ landed, or…

“New plan,” Dennis announced. “Send out hunter-killer drones, overheat prop mods and burn straight at _Monarch._ Let’s see if we can’t take her out.” He watched the _Monarch_ ’s fifty odd drones float towards the direction of _New Vistas_ , as well as his own ship massively accelerate.

“Captain, we’re being hailed. All frequencies.”

“Main speakers, Lieutenant.” He waited a moment.

“Hello, _Temporary Obstruction._ ” _Her_ voice came over the bridge speakers. It was distorted and artificial, like a stereotypical computer-generated voice. The voice of nightmares. He grit his teeth.

“What do you want?”

“Hmm,” Hebert said, as if she was considering. Like she hadn’t thought of what to demand before she started speaking. “Normally, this is the part where I would demand you turn over the barges and I let you two go with your hull mostly intact. This time, though…” Dennis imagined an evil grin. “I think I want all of it. Barges. The _Obstruction_. _New Vistas._ And most importantly, _you,_ Captain Dennis Hill.”

“Fuck you,” Missy said, over comms.

“Why me?” Dennis said.

“I’ll tell you once you’ve surrendered, my dear Captain. It’ll be easier that way. Safer for everyone involved.”

“Yeah, I’ll have to agree with _New Vistas_ here.” Dennis watched the _Monarch_ ’s icon rapidly draw near. Almost within weapons range.

Then a tiny ship, tinier than even _Imp_ , detached from the Monarch. _Broadcast Signal Intrusion_. It was a frigate, stripped of any non-essential systems such as shields, armor or a warp drive, manned by the Undersider known only as Tattletale. Whoever she was, the files had her down as an absolute master in electronic warfare.

“We’ve lost all target locks,” announced Ensign Novak at Sensors. “Jammed.”

“ _Fuck!_ ” Dennis had only felt so thoroughly defeated once before.

How had they known _everything_? Bubble along their exact navigation path, ceptor in the right spot, an EWAR ship loaded with the precise jamming suite to counter _Obstruction_ ’s sensor types… Distantly, he heard the three light beeps that signaled low shield. _Monarch_ had held back some drones to deal with his own, as well as batter down his shield. With her famed control, his hunter-killer drones were being ripped apart mercilessly.

Then the tactical map’s holoprojector flickered and went out.

“Captain!” Lt. Rhodes at Systems stood up abruptly. “Most of our modules just went offline.” A spike of fear ran through him. _Sabotage_. “Weapons, repairs, propulsion—” Everyone in the bridge was suddenly knocked forward as the engines rapidly reversed thrust. Dennis rolled over the captain’s console, while most of his crew were smashed against their own stations. Taylor stumbled into a wall with a heavy _clunk_ ; when she pushed herself upright again, the bulkhead had a dent where she’d landed. Dennis looked at her weirdly. Was she somehow wearing power armor under those clothes? Systems distracted him as the tactical map flickered back to life again, _Obstruction_ drifting not far from _Monarch_.

“Orders, captain?”

Dennis slowly stood up, and thought.

“Pull drones,” he finally said, in a voice that betrayed his weariness. There was no point in wasting perfectly fine drones against Hebert’s, not when they didn’t have main weapons, or targeting, or engines, or armor repair...

It had been barely a minute, but they were solidly defeated. He trudged back to his chair as he heard the steady patter of drone-fire chewing through his ship’s armor. It put him on edge. He turned his thoughts back to the current situation.

How had she done it?

Sabotage… He trusted his crewmates. And he trusted Taylor. But there were so many details that were adding up to a conclusion he desperately didn’t want to believe. He glanced back at the dent in the wall that Taylor had made.

He felt a touch on his back.

He spun around, looking back at Taylor. She seemed remarkably uncomfortable. “I’m sorry,” Taylor said.

Dennis shook his head, starting to sit back down. Then he paused. There was a sinking feeling in his chest.

Taylor averted her gaze, chewing her lip. “Maybe you should surrender? I don’t want you to be hurt. Or—or _anyone_ to be hurt. It will be easier if you surrender. Safer.” She was echoing Hebert’s words.

Dennis slowly looked up at Taylor. _Blushing_ Taylor, but... Taylor _Hebert_. _Monarch_ ’s captain, cyborg, warlord. He didn’t want to believe it, but… she was staring at him, now, her eyes growing steadily colder.

Her last words sounded just like earlier, when they were talking about the Endbringers.

Determined.

“You can’t be,” Dennis said. Weakly, even to his own ears. “All along...?”

The patter of drone-fire against the cruiser’s armor ceased, and Hebert—Taylor—spoke over comms, still with that artificial, grating voice. Three words.

“I’m sorry, Dennis.” The real Taylor, the one in front of him, said it in unison with comms-Taylor.

Distantly he heard Ensign Novak curse loudly. Dennis nearly did, too.

She continued in her real voice. “I didn’t mean to… to hurt you. You were—you _are_ a nice person. Really nice.” She faltered. “I still consider myself human, for what it matters. It hurts to do this.”

Dennis chuckled hollowly, standing back up to look her in the eyes. “Yeah, right. How much of you is machine?”

“Uhhh—seventy-nine percent by volume, last time I counted.” She shuffled her feet awkwardly.

Dennis clenched his fist. He’d always made morbid jokes about cyborgs who were more than half machine basically being robots. He’d been kidding, of course. But she was _way_ beyond that. More than two thirds. Holy _shit_. He’d known Taylor Hebert was a cyborg, but not just how far gone she was.

“Not that it matters. I’m sorry, Dennis. I’m sorry, but I had to—”

Dennis punched her.

He felt some of the bones in his hand break, while Taylor was knocked onto the floor with another _thunk_. She curled up, acting like she was hurt.

“ _Fuck_ you, Hebert,” he growled. Seething.

“Captain?” Systems’ voice. Still fighting, even now. ”We’re being neuted.” _Monarch_ was sapping his ship’s power, likely to commence boarding operations. Dennis spun around, looking back to the holo-display. The _Monarch_ was nearly bumping into _Obstruction_ , and there were glowing lines connecting the two. _New Vistas_ was crippled, drifting aimlessly and still hounded by the _Imp._ Multiple fires spouted from its hull, but it wasn’t destroyed yet. The crew would live.

“I don’t suppose the distress beacon went off,” Dennis said through grit teeth.

“No, sir, we were jammed.”

“Okay.” He turned and advanced on Taylor, who was still on the floor. “Hebert, I know you’re not _actually_ hurt. What do you want?” The lights on the bridge flickered, and the three tone Low Capacitor Alarm sounded.

Taylor looked up. Her earlier embarrassment and indecision were gone, and all that was left was icy determination. “Watch.” She sounded more like the comms-Hebert, now. Still no computer distortion, but the tone…

Which one was the act? Dennis couldn’t tell.

“Contact,” Lt. Morris said, tone business-like. The man was utterly unshakeable, even facing total defeat.

Dennis watched the map as space _twisted_. One moment there was nothing, then the next there was the red rounded diamond of an enemy carrier. The kilometer-long ship had jumped in, instantly traversing light years without having to sluggishly warp through space. Red static was likely crackling all across its surface. Proper jump drives, not micro-jump-drives, stressed hulls immensely and were only mounted on capital ships.

 _Hive_ , announced the carrier’s IFF transponder.

Ah.

“So you’ll load the barges, _Vistas_ , _Obstruction_ , even _Shroud_ and whatever the fuck the ceptor’s name was onto _that_.”

“Yes,” came the flat reply.

“Didn’t know the Undersiders had a fucking _carrier_.”

“It’s useful.” Taylor slowly got up, her arms bending the wrong way as she pushed herself upright. Her eyes, her irises were definitely glowing. Lt. Sharp’s hand twitched toward his holster, but he knew better than to draw on a fucking _bot_ like her. All he’d do was scratch the paint. “Let’s all cooperate, now.”

“I don’t have any choice, do I?”

“No,” Taylor agreed. “You don’t.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Much thanks to tearlessNevermore and BeaconHill for beta-ing. BeaconHill in particular gets a packet of black tea (hóngchá!) from New Yunnan. It’s tastier because it’s contraband.


	2. Teatime with Jane 2

Dennis Hill simmered as he stared out the window of his cabin aboard the _Hive_ , piloted by the woman he had thought was his friend. The stars were ever so slightly rotating—he supposed that the carrier took proportionate time to its bulk to align in order to warp out to gods knows where.

Hebert hadn’t said anything more while _Obstruction_ was being towed into the hangar. He’d expected her to gloat, to rub his defeat in his face. She’d said things, sure. Insinuated fiery death if they tried to accelerate over fifty percent throttle. But she didn’t talk to _him_. She’d just stood there with her eyes glowing, flaunting how different she was to the rest of them.

Which was the act? The cocky, callous trigger-happy warlord? Or the soft-spoken Protectorate officer he’d had tea with…?

It had to be the second one, Dennis told himself. It couldn’t _not_ have been. Jane was just a lie, a role to play to trick him into trusting her. No matter how convincing the act had been.

He had briefly seen Missy when his crew had been forced out of the _Obstruction_. She’d seemed intact, if not healthy. She’d been coughing badly. Hebert had simply stalked off, but men in power armor had separated them all and taken them to their respective accommodations.

Only when he had asked one of the men a question and received a curt response in an obviously computer-generated voice had he realized they were all robots. Looking closer, he could see that their limbs were a little too thin for there to be actual people inside.

He wasn’t too surprised, though, given who—or what, rather—Taylor Hebert was. A small part of him wondered if she piloted the entire _Hive_ on her own.

Two quick raps on the cabin door shook Dennis out of his reverie. He shot an annoyed look at the door behind him. “Look, we all know this is just a really comfortable cell, so why don’t you just let yourself in?”

The door hissed open. A blonde woman with her lips curled in a wry grin stepped into his cabin. Was she another cyborg?

“There’s no need to be impolite,” she said, glancing around the room.

Dennis glared at her, but she didn’t seem affected in the least. She grinned back.

He waited, but she didn’t elaborate. He sighed. “Okay, what do you want?”

“Nothing much. Just wanted to know how you were settling in, welcome you aboard _Hive_. I don’t think you’ve ever been on a carrier before?” Her dark green eyes watched him attentively. “No, I didn’t think so.” She spread her arms. “So yeah! Welcome aboard, collect your complimentary towels at the front. Did you know that the _Hive_ is two thousand one hundred eighty—”

“Spare me the trivia,” Dennis said with a groan. She stopped talking. Not grinning. “What’re the _relevant_ facts? And who are you?”

“Well, I just wanted to tell you that we have a great observation deck, a proper one, not just a room. And a mess you can go eat in. You could have your meals brought to your room, if you really wanted to. The rest of the ship is mostly off limits for you, unless you have an escort. I’m Lisa, by the way, though I think you’d know me better as Tattletale.” She plopped herself onto Dennis’s bed.

Dennis blinked. “Captain of the EWAR frigate?”

“The one and only.” She flashed another grin at him. “Sorry ‘bout the jamming, by the way. I’m sure you know it’s nothing personal. Following orders, minimizing casualties, et cetera.”

What was Dennis even supposed to say to that? No, it’s okay, we all have our duties? So he kept silent.

Lisa nodded at Dennis’s hand, the one he had punched Hebert with. “Think you need that looked at.”

True. His right hand had been constantly radiating pain the whole trip to the _Hive._ The pain spiked whenever he tried to move his hand at all, and it was starting to swell badly. He stared at his hand, fascinated by how grotesque it looked.

Lisa cleared her throat. “Yeah, you should come with me to the medbay. Might as well give you the tour while we’re at it.” She got up and left the room. Dennis followed.

Despite her promise not to spout trivia at him, she chattered about the retrofits they’d done to the _Hive_. Mostly replacing human crew with drones to save space. He wasn’t surprised. They travelled down a twisting maze of hallways, all alike and with nothing to distinguish them.

“There’s also a research wing with medical facilities that-a-way, because of Taylor’s, uh, _special interests_ —”

For the first time since they’d left his room, Dennis spoke up. “That’s lewd, Lisa.”

“—and there’s—” Lisa sputtered. “What? That’s _not_ what I meant at all, and you know that.” She looked at him crossly.

Dennis grinned. “It was low-hanging fruit, I had to take it.”

Lisa considered him, then she smiled. “I’m going to have to get you back for that. You know this, right?”

“Worth it.” Dennis looked at the millionth unmarked hallway they were going down. “By the way, how do you know where you’re going? None of the hallways we’ve been in had any signs, and I don’t think I missed a map, either.”

“For one, I’ve been living on this carrier on a year,” she said. “For two, I have implants that let me access any information the _Hive_ has…” Lisa stopped as Dennis did. He felt his heartrate rise.

“You’re—”

“No, Dennis, just because I have an implant doesn’t mean I’m not human anymore.” Lisa rolled her eyes. “Come on, your hand isn’t getting any better with you just standing around.”

Dennis couldn’t tell whether to run or fight. His right hand throbbed along with his every heartbeat. Lisa sighed.

“What has a cyborg ever done to you?”

Was she serious? She must’ve read his expression, because she quickly amended her question.

“That a person specifically wouldn’t have done? People betray each other all the time.”

He stayed silent. She narrowed her eyes.

“Hypothetical: You’re on a Vexor with an exposed bridge. Your shields just went down, then a laser bolt smashes the window and neatly shears off your entire arm. You’ll live, because the wound’s been cauterized too. What if you got your arm replaced then? Would that count as you having lost your humanity? Tell me.”

Dennis swallowed hard. He took a deep breath, like Tay—like Jane had told him.

“No, I guess not,” he said.

“Yeah. Shit happens when you’re a captain. Guess who lost her first arm that way?”

He averted his gaze. “That’s different. Maybe she _started_ with a real prosthetic, but you don’t replace more than half of your body by accident. Being deliberate about it is like deciding to actively throw away _you_. And brain implants…” He shuddered.

“I mean yeah, I agree that the ones that let you think faster or multitask better are a little creepy. A lot creepy. But the ones I have? They’re really more like advanced notes. I can search for things the _Hive_ has in her computers, look up my notes, and maybe run some basic pattern matching. Stuff you could do with a spreadsheet. It’s helpful, but it doesn’t change who I am.”

She looked to the side.

“I’ll be honest with you, I wouldn’t do what she’s done. And I don’t want to be as much of a robot as she is. But I do care about her.”

Dennis thought about it. He still wasn’t sure about Taylor Hebert, but he couldn’t deny that Lisa, at least, seemed genuine.

After a long while, she sighed. “C’mon. Med-bay.”

Dennis followed, still thinking.

The actual process of fixing his hand was simple. He put his arm in a long tube and sat still. He felt the prick of anesthetic, then a dull sense of pressure as the nanite injector activated. Around five minutes later, the tube split into half, leaving his hand and wrist in a thin, rigid metal cast. Lisa told him that it would take two to five days to heal, and also that it would hurt a lot.

“You know, this wouldn’t have been a problem if you had a cyborg arm,” Lisa said as they left the med-bay. “Are you _sure_ you don’t want your inferior human flesh chopped off and replaced?”

Dennis pinched the bridge of his nose with his good hand. His eyes were closed, but he could picture the expression Lisa had. Not only had the med-bay been dominated by machines that looked more suitable for welding than healing, Lisa had spent the whole time suggesting he ‘shed the weakness of the human body’ and ‘embrace the future’ with a wide grin on her face. This was his payback for earlier, he knew, and he had to endure it. “Where are you taking me next?”

“The mess. I can’t babysit you all day, I have work to do and only one body to do it with. We could go through the hangar on the way, see your ship.”

Dennis shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”

Lisa grinned. “Okay, let’s take a scooter.” She touched a panel on the wall, which slid open to reveal a two-seated electric scooter.

Dennis stared at it. “Why didn’t we take that before?”

“It, uh, slipped my mind?” Lisa shrugged unconvincingly.

He glared at her as they got on. Lisa didn’t seem inclined to talk more, focusing on driving the scooter, so he instead silently watched the hallways pass. The electric scooter was quiet. The feeling, and pain, in his right hand started returning.

It only took three turns, but he soon found himself traveling down a wide, high main hall that he hadn’t even seen before. It was tiled with large white slabs, and too long for Dennis to see the far end, as full of traffic as it was. Other scooters navigated around groups of people, darting in and out of the many cross-hallways. He realized that he hadn’t actually seen any other humans on the _Hive_ until now.

“Did you intentionally pick empty halls when we were going to the med bay?” Dennis looked at Lisa.

Lisa nodded. “I thought it would be a good idea.”

Dennis frowned. “Am I that obvious?”

“A… little,” she said. “To me, at least.”

“I see.”

Lisa weaved the scooter around passerby and into a corridor. The clean white décor of the main hall abruptly ended. Instead, the floor here was some kind of poured material that Dennis knew from experience to have good traction. As the hall began to curve, Lisa hung a sharp left and blew past a sign that stated:

HORIZONTAL CLEARANCE 2.0M

Beneath the text was an icon of an electric scooter with a large X placed over it.

Dennis gaped. “Uh, Lisa?”

“Yeah?”

The green floor then turned into a catwalk with thin railings. The floor was a metal mesh, and he could see the hangar floor dozens of meters beneath them. Their scooter barely fit. He had to shout to be heard, now, because the hangar echoed with the buzzing, sparking and clanging sounds hangars usually did.

“Whoa! Slow down!”

“No!” Lisa _sped up_.

Dennis’s scream was swallowed by the terrible acoustics of the hangar. He felt a tap on his shoulder.

“Look! It’s your ship!” He looked.

The _Temporary_ _Obstruction_ was so much larger compared to him. From this angle, he was looking up at the forty meter tall fin under the _Obstruction_ , and if he craned his neck he could see the grey-green underside of the port micro warp drive housings that extended laterally near the top of his ship. Most of the surfaces were marred with the telltale scars left by the onboard repair system. Some areas looked like they had melted and flowed before solidifying again, while others had dents. The light didn’t bounce right off of patches here and there, too. Onboard ship repair was ‘good enough’ for utility purposes, but it didn’t look pretty. And the _Obstruction_ had been in a lot of fights.

Four spider-shaped drones crawled into view. Although they looked small compared to the _Obstruction_ , Dennis knew they were actually taller than he was. The spiders didn’t look bothered by the fact that they were clinging onto a vertical surface.

“What are they doing?” he shouted at Lisa.

Bright blue sparks scattered from the forelegs of each spider. They were slicing at the cruiser’s armor panels. He felt a surge of panic. He also felt betrayal, which was odd because he thought he’d already hit rock bottom in that particular department.

“Relax, they’re not scrapping your ship!” she shouted. “Taylor burnt your prop mods out. So she’s replacing them with better ones!”

Dennis watched the spiders carefully complete their cut. The eight hundred millimeter thick panel was worked out of its frame and ferried away by a different pair of spiders. The ease at which the spiders worked was almost frightening. Those armor panels were absurdly thick. The fin quickly fell away, though, as Lisa sped on.

“I thought she had total control over my ship,” he said. He didn’t expect Lisa to have heard.

“Nah. Hey, you can see my ship from here!” Lisa pointed, then frowned. “Wait, no, that’s Alec’s.”

Dennis followed her finger and saw a frigate that looked almost exactly like a beetle, with long spikes all along its centerline. A Succubus-class, rare ships that were worth as much as three _Temporary Obstruction_ s. They were notoriously nimble, and some cruisers couldn’t even track them well enough to land shots with their weapons.

They entered a tunnel and soon found themselves back on solid ground, or as solid as one could get inside a ship.

“Pricy ship,” Dennis commented. He thought his ears were still ringing. “Also, please don’t do that again. Or if you do, can I drive?”

“No promises,” Lisa said. “And yeah, he doesn’t like to undock very often. Only when Taylor tells him that it’s really important to. He’s pretty lazy.”

“Is everyone so personally loyal to, uh, Taylor?”

“I mean, we’re all in this together.” Lisa turned to look at him. “But yes, she’s the one who keeps us together, directs us towards a goal.”

Dennis pressed his lips together. “Why are you telling me all this? And why are you treating me so well, when I’m literally your prisoner?”

“Oh?” Lisa looked at Dennis with a predatory look in her eye. “You haven’t figured it out yet?” She stepped on the brakes hard, nearly throwing Dennis out of his seat, laughing. “Taylor _likes_ you! You’re seriously… Wow.”

“You’re shitting me,” Dennis said. “She sabotaged my ship and stabbed me in the back!”

“You didn’t know that she delayed the attack until the last possible moment, did you? She was having _fun_. She _enjoyed_ talking to you.”

“Then why…?”

Lisa smirked. “Cause she’s still a warlord. You were in her way. So she removed you, even if she felt bad about it. But _I_ thought she could use someone to talk to, so I convinced her to give you a chance.” She was still smirking. “You still have one, by the way. Don’t fuck it up.”

“A chance.”

She patted him on the back. “Sorry, that’s about all I can tell ya.” She didn’t look very sorry. “Take it from me, Dennis, you’ll be getting real close and personal with those other machines in the med-bay if you mess up. No pressure though,” she added.

Dennis tried to ask a question, but she poked him in the chest. “Get your butt into the mess hall, I told you I’m busy.”

He scrambled out of the scooter and watched as Lisa drove off with a cheery wave.

* * *

The mess wasn’t really a _mess_. It was more like a food court, with touch screens to order food from and a wide variety of choices, rather than one or two set meals per day. Some of the kitchen was open, and he could see chefs busily preparing all kinds of meals. And according to a sign on a column, this was “Mess 4”—as in, there were at least three more of these things on the ship. _Hive_ really was more of a station than a military vessel.

There was only one problem with getting a meal, though: he needed to scan a crew identification chip. Which, technically being a prisoner, he did not have. He frowned. Should he ask someone nearby to help out? What if the crew were only allowed three meals per day?

“Hello. Do you require assistance with your meal?”

Dennis jumped and spun around. The dark-skinned woman standing behind him was, frankly, beautiful, both her face and her proportions. But something about her was disturbing—he couldn’t quite put his finger on what, though.

“Do you require assistance with your meal?” she repeated, in that same monotone.

It was her utter lack of expression, Dennis decided, and the way her eyes seemed to be looking _through_ him. They were blank and unfocused. “Err, are you okay?”

“My status is nominal,” the woman said. “Do you require assistance with—”

Dennis was staring now. Something was _very_ wrong with her. “Who _are_ you?”

“My name is Aisha, and my operator is Taylor Hebert.” Aisha’s name was vaguely familiar.

“…Operator? What _happened_ to you?”

“I was captured three months ago near the system of Advocate. She installed implants to dampen my free will without damaging my mental capabilities so that I may serve her better.”

Dennis took a step back in shock. “She lobotomized you? What the _fuck_.”

“No, although the effects are similar.”

Was _this_ the fate Lisa had been trying to warn him about? Being fucking _lobotomized_? He looked at the woman—she was watching him with an utterly placid expression. He bit back his panic. “So, uh, h-how does it feel?”

Aisha’s eyes fluttered. “I do not understand that question. I do not feel”—her lips quirked—“I, I cannot… feel… I…” Her voice faltered.

Then she burst into laughter, almost doubled over howling.

Dennis blinked. “That… that was a _joke_?” He paused. “You’re not really lobotomized, right?”

“Of course not,” she said, laughing. He crossed his arms, and Aisha grinned. “She likes me too much for that.”

Dennis snorted. Her cheer was infectious, he had to admit. “What is it with the Undersiders and annoying the hell out of people? First Lisa, then you.”

“It’s fun! You should try it sometime. See if you can put one over on the bossman.” Aisha didn’t seem to notice Dennis’s scowl when she mentioned the leader of the Undersiders. “Hey, do you still need a meal? Look, I can do magic.” Aisha showed her empty hands, wiggled her fingers then produced a bottle cap-sized chip. She tapped it to the screen, which spat out a ticket with a number on it. “Ta-da!”

“Thanks,” Dennis said.

“Hey, was the chick with the sick undercut your friend?”

“Yes, why do you ask?”

Aisha pointed at the other side of the mess hall. Missy was standing in front of a screen just like Dennis’s, facing the same problem he had been. “Looks like I’ll be giving out _all_ the free meals today. Woo, go me!” She swaggered over to the other side of the mess.

It was too neat to have been coincidence. Was Lisa responsible for this? He picked up his food when his number was called and chose an empty table to sit at. Soon enough, Aisha was dragging Missy to the table, too. Missy smiled at Dennis when she spotted him.

“Hey Dennis,” she said as greeting. “I’m glad you’re okay. What happened to your hand?”

Aisha cackled. “He punched _Taylor_.”

“The cyborg?”

“One and only.” Aisha grinned wickedly. “The best part? He’s going to hurt for a _long_ time, while Taylor… she barely felt it.”

“Five days,” Dennis acknowledged.

Missy whistled. “Sucks to be you.” She turned to Aisha. “How do you know this, anyways?”

Dennis raised an eyebrow. “You’re, uh, on the Undersiders’ ship?”

Missy blew her bangs away from her face. “That’s not a very funny joke, Dennis.”

“But… we are?”

Aisha’s grin turned mischievous. She locked eyes with Dennis, as if to say ‘watch _this_.’ She turned to Missy. “I haven’t _properly_ introduced myself. Other than having shot you down, I’m also Imp, proud member of the Undersiders.” She stuck her hand out.

Missy’s curious look quickly turned angry. “Hey! What are _you_ doing here?” She half-rose from her seat, turning towards Aisha. She paused.

Then she sat down again, looking confused. “Uh. What were we talking about, guys?”

Dennis gaped at Missy. _This_ was the real thing—Missy wasn’t the type to pull pranks. “The fuck did you do to her?” He glared at Aisha.

Aisha shrugged. “Wasn’t me. Bossman did the chipping.” Missy looked between Aisha and Dennis, baffled. Aisha stuck her hand out again, to shake. “Hey, I’m the ceptor pilot that scrammed the shit out of you. Sorry ‘bout that, but nothing personal, right? Just doing our jobs. You almost got me, anyways.” To Dennis, she said, “This one will stick, I think.”

That was a paper-thin alibi, Dennis thought. Who would believe it?

Missy shook her hand, grinning. “Was really touch-and-go. You’re pretty good.” She smirked. “Bet you couldn’t have scratched my paint without the _Monarch_ ’s drones backing you up, though.”

Aisha was about to reply to that challenge, looking indignant, but Dennis spoke first. “Hey, Aisha? Can I have a word?”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine, _Captain_ Hill. Whatsup?” She followed him three or so meters away from the table.

Dennis whirled on her. “This isn’t funny anymore.”

“I thought it was pretty funny.” Aisha shrugged. “It’s a little mind control, what’s the matter with that?”

“What’s the—” Dennis choked. “What the fuck,” he said, instead. “You said she wasn’t lobotomizing anybody!”

“No, I said she said she didn’t lobotomize _me_.” She sighed. “Sorry. But that’s her plan, isn’t it? Go around and put little mind control chips in everyone, make them all play nice with each other and kill the Endbringers. Perfect plan.” She studied his face. “Oh, you didn’t know, huh. Oops?”

He growled, clenching his good fist. “Here I am, thinking that maybe, just maybe, Taylor Hebert could be a good person. And then you go and hit me with _this_.”

“She’s a good person, I think,” Aisha said slowly. “She cares about us, and she’s fun to be around. She’s just… creepy, sometimes. When she has a job to do.”

“And you’re okay with this? What if she brainwashed _you_?”

Aisha smirked. “Wrong person to ask. I volunteered, but my bro told me no. Also, I bet if you ask her about it, she’ll say something like”—she said her next words in an exaggerated, nagging tone—“‘ _It’s not mind control, Aisha, it’s loyalty enforcement. Totally different, Aisha._ ’”

Dennis wanted to punch something. But look where that got him the last time. “Fuck,” he murmured.

“‘Kay, so… can I go back to talk with my newest friend, now?” Aisha was grinning like nothing had happened. “Thanks.” She walked back to Missy without waiting for an answer. Dennis followed.

Aisha and Missy got along pretty well, Dennis learned. They apparently bonded over flying small, fragile ships. But she couldn’t seem to remember that Aisha was one of the Undersiders, no matter how many times they told her. She also didn’t think they were on the Undersiders’ carrier. How deep was this mind control? It obviously wasn’t a lobotomy—Missy sounded exactly like her usual outgoing and slightly cynical self. Just… she couldn’t think about some things. He picked at his food, appetite gone. He was too disturbed to eat.

Missy got up once her meal was finished. “It was fun talking to you,” she told Aisha, “but I have to turn in now. My ship’s going to be done with repairs by tomorrow morning.”

“Aw, that sucks,” Aisha said. “Keep in touch?”

“Where are you going?” Dennis asked.

“To Rediviva,” she said. “I have to escort the two barges to safe space, even if Taylor Hebert stole all the ore.”

Aisha looked at Dennis meaningfully. “Your cruiser needs more extensive repairs, remember? It might take up to an entire month.”

That was utter bullshit, Dennis thought. But he didn’t say anything.

Missy laughed once. “How’d you get _that_ dinged up by Hebert?”

“She was literally on my ship,” he protested. Missy grinned and waved. One of those robotic drones walked up to her, and she accompanied it out of the mess. “It doesn’t get any less creepy, does it,” he said, mostly to himself.

“What does?” Aisha stretched.

Dennis waved his hand expansively. “All of it. Having robots run around the ship, having your friends fucking _mind controlled_ , having a cyborg boss?”

“I dunno,” Aisha said. “I got used to it.” Dennis shrugged. “Hey, do you know where you’re going to go next?”

“I don’t know. Lisa just dumped me here after getting my hand fixed up.”

Aisha gaped. “Lisa? Did you… take a scooter? Wow, you’re crazy.”

“I thought it wasn’t _too_ bad,” Dennis lied. He knew that Aisha would rub it in his face, repeatedly, if she learned he had screamed.

Aisha smirked. “I’ll make sure to tell Lisa that.” Dennis winced, and she laughed at him.

“I think I could use an escort to the observation deck, though,” he said as Aisha’s laughter died down. “I heard the _Hive_ has one?”

Aisha perked up again. “Yeah! It’s awesome. Everyone hangs out there, like, all the time. We can go there.”

The two made their way out of the cafeteria, and Aisha drove the scooter. He had expected her to drive like a bat out of hell, but it seemed like Aisha reserved her craziness for flying. When he pointed that out, he had to endure a rant about stereotypes and how it was bad to put people in boxes. He wasn’t entirely sure whether she was serious or not.

* * *

The observation deck was stunning. The seventy meter long room was dim with no light other than dim red strips along the path, solely illuminated by the constantly changing filaments of light that made up the infinite-length warp tunnel, seen through the floor-to-ceiling window that was the far wall. It looked as if it were a single, flawless pane of glassteel—though he knew that it was actually multiple panes fit into a nearly invisible frame—that gave him the impression that there was nothing separating the inside of the ship from the outside. Countless stars twinkled beyond.

Despite all this, though, Dennis found himself missing his own ship’s lounge.

He made his way through the room. A surprising number of people were occupying the arm chairs, couches, and backless cushions scattered around the deck, but he had eyes only for the figure silhouetted by light, facing the window, with her long, curly hair.

There wasn’t any reason for her to be here, he thought. Perhaps on the _Obstruction_ , she had been communicating with her ship and the Undersiders. But here? Maybe… maybe she really did like seeing the stars go by.

He half expected her to turn and greet him, like she had before. He didn’t know why, nor why he felt a strange sense of loss when she didn’t. Dennis stood there for a while, not knowing what exactly he should do.

He was about to turn and leave, when she turned her head ever so slightly. He hesitated, then approached.

She was having tea.

Dennis clenched his fist. He reminded himself of the _Obstruction_ , of Missy, of her look when she had betrayed him. He walked up to Taylor Hebert and sat in an armchair to her side.

She glanced at him, expression neutral, then wordlessly poured him a cup of tea. In the light, the red liquid in the handle-less ceramic cup was nearly black.

He didn’t touch it.

The steam from the cup slowly dwindled and disappeared.

Taylor Hebert spoke. “What do you want to talk about, Captain Hill?” Her voice was carefully level, and wary.

Dennis realized he had been tensing for the past few minutes. He consciously relaxed. “I want…” His voice faltered, then came back harder. “I want answers.” He paused, trying to figure out how to best say it, then gave up. He looked her in the eye. “Why did you do that to Missy? Why mind control? Was having your own sector of space where you’re the boss not enough? You just had to go and take people and make them into your pawns, like—like the Yangban do.”

Her look quickly turned into a glare. “It’s not mind control,” she hissed. “And it’s not brainwashing, either.”

“Then what?” He didn’t back down. “It sure seemed like it.”

“I’m making them trustworthy, dependable. I am _not_ taking away their free will. They’re still the same people after, except they’ll fucking _work together_.”

Dennis scoffed. “If you make them follow your orders, isn’t that taking away their free will? You’re worse, even. You’re pretending that you aren’t.”

“I’m trying to save the _whole damn_ _galaxy_ here, Dennis.” Her tone was icy. She took a deep breath, let it out. “Please. Have some tea.”

Dennis scowled. “Always with the fucking tea. Do you really enjoy this? Can you still _taste_ it with your robot tongue? Or is it just a, a habit? Pretending like you’re still human? Fucking bull _shit_.” He stood up, flipped her tea-table. Tea, pot and cups went flying.

“No!” Taylor jumped out of her seat and managed to catch the teapot with her bare hands, heedless of the scalding water. The cups shattered. She fell into a crouch, hugging her teapot and gazing at the remains of her teacups.

Dennis turned and left, and ordered one of the drones standing outside to take him to his room.

He tried not to think of how she had looked when he’d ruined her tea.

Heartbroken.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to tearlessNevermore for being my san check and BeaconHill for spending hours and hours betaing. BeaconHill in particular gets Aisha’s identification chip. I’m sure she’ll just get a new one.


	3. Shadowplay

It was better than jail, but Paige still thought her exile was unfair.

She would never be able to fly freely in Protectorate space without running the risk of being chased down and arrested. Oh, she had fake identities for when she needed to resupply, and border outposts weren’t too picky about her papers, but that wasn’t being _her_. Paige Mcabee was _persona non grata_ in the Protectorate.

She carried out her term deep in uncharted space, hundreds of light years from civilization, with only Dragon to talk to. Even her, she could only talk with through comms. It wasn’t the same as having someone right there, in person.

“How are you doing, Paige?” Dragon’s warm, neutrally accented voice filled the bridge. Paige had put the comms on the speakers instead of using headphones.

“I’m doing okay, Dragon,” she said wearily. “The wormhole I came through just collapsed, and I have probes out for the next one.” She knew the motions by now. Brushing some stray yellow hair aside, she ordered her probes to start a new scan.

Paige would’ve been sentenced to the Birdcage—the _Andrew H. Baumann_ , inescapable prison station. Her specialty was comms devices—but not just any kind. Hers could hijack comms networks, forcing people to choose between turning them off, going dark in the middle of a battle, or leaving them on, and _losing their minds_. The last cruel twist in her specialty. Anathema to the Protectorate, for the sanctity of one’s mind was inviolable. Why the Endbringer _Simurgh_ was feared so much more than its siblings. The fact that her specialty was eerily similar to one of the _Simurgh_ ’s preferred EWAR methods hadn’t done her any good.

She knew all this, and had kept her specialty secret and her head down, running a popular set of inter-system comms relays, using her specialty to boost the signal much farther than normal. But then pirates attacked. She had had no choice but to jam them, but she’d been angry, taunting them through their comms. Perhaps that changed what happened—they’d started fighting each other, instead. They blew each other up and shot their own comrades’ pods. Paige could only watch in horror – they hadn’t thought to turn their comms off.

She hadn’t wanted that to happen, but that didn’t change the fact that she had killed. Murder, second degree on multiple counts, they said. Mind control, aggravated. Heinous crimes against the commonwealth of mankind. They’d also tried to accuse her of unprovoked assault, but her lawyer had assured her that it wouldn’t stick, and besides the former two crimes were much more severe, anyways.

“Have you scanned the system yet, Paige?” Dragon always insisted on calling her by her name, instead of the unflattering nickname the government had attached to her, as it did to all criminals and suspects. She’d been scared of the Undersiders’ leader, before all this happened—Taylor Hebert, called ‘Skitter.’ But now Paige herself was ‘Siren.’ The media had loved it. Paige was just surprised they hadn’t flat out named her ‘Ziz.’

Dragon herself _always_ went by a nickname, but it wasn’t the Protectorate’s – she’d come up with her own, as far as Paige knew. Dragon still hadn’t told her real name.

“I was about to start,” Paige replied, holding down the _Transmit_ button on her console. Which she had triple quadruple checked did not activate her ‘enhanced’ comms systems. “I’ll need to decloak for that, though, and I want to locate the next wormhole before I do.”

Dragon hummed an acknowledgement. “I can’t deny that staying cloaked feels safer,” she said. “Even if there’s probably nobody around.”

Paige smiled. “Yeah.” She was always nice to talk to. And without her, Paige knew she would’ve been headed straight for the Birdcage. Her sentence was instead commuted from life in jail, to permanent exile from the Protectorate, with a correspondingly permanent ‘suspect’ status that would let anyone fire on her ship without being punished for it. Dragon hadn’t stopped at giving her freedom, though. The warlord—technically, since she didn’t answer to Protectorate authority—had given her a ship, an Astero-class frigate. _Mockingbird_ , Paige had named it. It was all she owned now.

Paige didn’t know why Dragon was so generous to her. But she was grateful.

Unlike many exploration frigates, the Astero was built with combat in mind, so the bridge was near the core of the structure. It might be a safer design, but Paige felt a little claustrophobic at times. She leaned forward and pressed a switch, changing the main display to the external camera view instead of the dreary probe scanner screen. It helped, but it wasn’t anywhere near the same. Paige grumbled to herself. What kind of exploration ship didn’t even have windows?

Even so, Astero-class frigates were pretty. Its exterior was pure white, the hull shaped like an overturned canoe and bristling with external comm units, antennae and sensors. Most distinctive was its ‘halo,’ two half-rings that circled the rear of the hull, tips accented in red paint and emitting a hazy blue glow between them. It was the warp ring, a distinctive feature of the _Haven_ line of ships. By moving the warp core out of the main hull of the ship, Asteros could warp while cloaked, have increased sensor sensitivity, and have more room for comfort features such as a proper shower, foods that aren’t rations, and a full complement of drones for self-defense.

Paige’s Astero also had her specialty comms hijacking units installed. She tried not to, but Dragon had told her that resisting one’s talent never went well. Paige made a promise to herself that no matter what, she would never ever use them. She even ‘forgot’ to connect the control for them. She would need to open up her console and manually hook them up. Safety measures against herself.

Not that she’d ever need them, or the drones. Uncharted space was _empty_. She had barely seen other probes on her D-scan during the past year, and what ship signatures she had seen were usually exploration ships that posed no threat to her—Helioses, Buzzards, and so on.

Her probes pinged, having found a wormhole. Like soap bubbles, they formed briefly, lasting days to weeks before collapsing. But they often let her cut days off of trips between systems, so Paige always made sure to check them. She deactivated _Mockingbird_ ’s cloak and started aligning towards the closest planet for an in-depth scan. She thought of something that had always made her curious. “Dragon, how are you always able to talk to me? Aren’t you busy?” Keeping her territory, she didn’t add.

Dragon chuckled. “I am,” she said, “but I’m also very good at prioritizing, and I can multitask very well.”

Paige thought Dragon was a cyborg. It would explain everything—how she managed to control an entire fleet by herself, how she refused to live in the Protectorate but didn’t act like a typical warlord. How she had sympathy for people like her, unwanted by the Protectorate. Why nobody ever saw her real face. She didn’t want to confront Dragon with her suspicions, though. Dragon was a nice person, half-robot or not. Instead, she said, “I just don’t want to bother you. I can handle being on my own for a bit.”

There was a pause. “Paige,” Dragon said, “I always have time for my friends.”

“Thanks,” Paige said. She sighed. “It gets really lonely out here.”

“Maybe you should find some crew?”

Paige snorted. “As if anyone would want to serve under a suspect. And _I_ don’t trust the sort of people who would be willing to work for a suspect anyways.”

“You’re being unfair to yourself. You might have the yellow suspect tag, but it doesn’t define who you are.”

Paige watched the velocity display tick up towards seventy five percent, the threshold for entering warp. “I’d have to find someone I’d be okay with spending weeks with in a tiny ship. Someone I fit with. It’s like dating, except jumping straight into a committed marriage.”

“That’s a funny way of putting that,” Dragon said, laughing. “But I suppose it’s true, too. It’s better to try and fail than give up, though.”

“Yeah,” Paige said. “I guess. Maybe next time I stop at a station.” Not going to happen, she knew. They’d had this conversation before.

The drab voice of the computer announced, “Warp drive active.” The Mockingbird’s absolute velocity went to zero, then shot up into hyper-light speeds. She felt the ship shudder as it accelerated, before smoothing out once it hit the Astero’s cruising velocity of ten AU/s. Paige meticulously inspected and maintained her precious ship, meaning that there was no creaking, but the turbulence was an unavoidable aspect of the exotic physics surrounding the warp drive. In fact, this was fairly mild turbulence: an Astero’s external warp ring stabilized the ‘warp shake,’ as it was called.

The tunnel collapsed within seconds. Planets weren’t that far away, compared to star systems. She started the tedious task of scanning the second rocky planet of this system, setting up a looping orbital path that would cover most of its surface. It would take maybe an hour. Thank god for autopilot. She leaned back in her padded chair, considering having a snack.

Thirty minutes in, her D-scan beeped.

A new signature had appeared—one Stratios-class cruiser. Another Haven design, also equipped with a warp ring and enhanced cloaking capabilities… and more than enough firepower to destroy the _Mockingbird_ ten times over. It might have been friendly, but Paige didn’t want to risk it. She cancelled the autopilot and started turning her ship away from the planet in order to enter warp. The speed gauge ticked down, then back up. Too slow.

“Dragon, there’s something on D-scan. I’m going to try and warp out.” Paige flicked on the tactical hologram in the center of her console. One large circle for the planet, several eclipsed circles for its moons—and the white pentagon of an unidentified cruiser, five kilometers away, flying straight at her. It _was_ after her. The _Shadow Stalker_. She wasn’t going to get away in time. The electronic needle of the speed gauge started its slow climb to sixty percent.

The computer played a shrill beep that meant the cruiser had engaged her ship. Paige’s heart sank.

The display showed a red box around the white pentagon, indicating it had locked her, and was attacking her. Warp scrambler. She wasn’t getting away—her micro warp drive was out of action, now. She aligned anyways. Maybe her enemy would make a mistake and drop the scram for a moment.

“Dragon,” Paige sent, “It’s a ship called _Shadow Stalker_. I’m tackled.”

There was a long pause. _Shadow Stalker_ started deploying drones. Paige locked the _Stalker_ back and sent her own drones out, reluctant. Jamming drones would hopefully break the Stratios’s target lock, and warp scrambler, for at least a moment, enough to escape. She also scrammed the _Shadow Stalker_ to cut off its micro warp drive, forcing it to a crawl. The cruiser would be slower than the Astero without the MWD.

“That’s Sophia Hess. A pirate-hunter,” Dragon said. “I don’t know why she’s after _you_ , but she usually picks fights she knows she can win. I’m sorry, Paige. But I don’t think you will be harmed.”

Paige trembled. “Jail…?” The Stratios deployed its own hunter-killer drones to kill her EWAR ones, and peppered the _Mockingbird_ with beam lasers that chewed through its paper-thin shields.

“No,” Dragon said, firmly. “If you were captured by a pirate-hunter and brought back to the Protectorate, they would simply exile you again.” She paused. “And if they decided not to, I would step in.”

Paige closed her eyes. Three light beeps signaled that her shields had been penetrated. “Okay, Dragon. I’ll still try my best. Out.”

“Good luck, Paige.” She cut the line.

Sophia Hess immediately hailed her. “Hello, _Siren_ ,” she said, clearly sneering.

Paige watched her EWAR drones die, one by one. She sent out more to replace them, but she knew it wouldn’t work. Maybe… Her hand drifted towards the hijack controls, before she remembered she needed to connect them, first. She switched her comms to open mic and ducked under her console, unlatching the cover. She needed to stall.

“What do you want from me?” Her voice had a tremor in it. She found the missing wire.

“You’re a criminal,” Hess said.

Paige clipped the wire in place and stood up. “I’m an _explorer_. I’m not even in Protectorate space. _Anyone’s_ space.” Her hand shook badly as she flipped on the toggle for her comms hijack systems. She kept the signal strength low—hopefully low enough that Hess wouldn’t notice—but it would do the job. Now she just needed to keep her talking long enough for it to make a difference.

Her repair module was struggling to keep up with the onslaught of lasers; she flipped the overheat switch.

“‘The long arm of the law has no borders,’” Hess drawled, sounding like she was quoting something out of a Protectorate pamphlet. She didn’t sound sincere at all. In fact, she sounded _gleeful_. “Hope you got your escape pod ready.”

Paige bit her lip. She summoned some bravado she didn’t have. “Just… Leave me alone. Go away, dammit.” She was all out of EWAR drones, now. Once her armor was punctured, she would need to go to her escape pod, if she wanted any chance at living. “A-are you going to kill me?” Paige hated herself for asking.

“Maybe. It would be an accident, of course.” The hail of lasers stopped. Paige blinked, doubting her eyes. “To be honest, I dunno if you deserve to live. You’re not even _trying_ to fight back.” Hess’s drones ceased firing, too, instead continuing their lazy orbit around the _Mockingbird_ ’s hull. Her ship’s armor started solidifying again. “C’mon. I’ll give you a free shot.”

“I’m not a fighter. I don’t know how to fight.” Paige deployed her anti-ship light drones. One by one, the blue crosshairs that represented her drones appeared on her tactical map. She hesitated for a long while, then set them on Hess’s drones, hoping to reduce her firepower. They swirled around the medium drones they were shooting, their onboard computers automatically plotting their courses. “Fuck, what’s the point? You’re just going to blow me up, aren’t you?” She checked the distance. Ten kilometers from the Shadow Stalker. Barely within heated scram range—ten point eight—which meant she might have a chance to escape. Her own warp scrambler was one third damaged from the heat. Was her comms hijack not working? Or just not fast enough?

“That’s more like it,” Hess said, satisfied. “You _do_ know how to fight. I’ll try not to kill you. Just your ship.” Her armor started depleting, again. Paige swore. Almost. The distance ticked upwards, now at ten point five. She heard the three beeps that signaled low capacitor. Neuts? She reached for the capacitor injector lever—

—then Paige stumbled.

Dizzy.

What…?

Why was she on the floor? She was on her back, looking up at the white metal panels making up the ceiling. She sat up, and glanced at the tactical map.

It was empty. She was in the middle of space, fifty AUs from the sun of this system. The activation light for the cloak was glowing a gentle green.

Had she gotten away?

Paige stood up, slowly. Other than a bruised feeling in the back of her head, she was feeling fine.

Now that she noticed, Dragon was talking to her.

“Paige? Paige, are you okay?” She paused, then seemed to mutter to herself. “The signal’s going through…”

Paige walked to the console.

She blinked. She’d lost another second there, somehow. She pressed the button to reply. “I’m okay. I got away. I blacked out, I think. I might have a concussion…?”

“It’s been thirty minutes since you last talked to me,” Dragon said. “What happened?”

Paige tried to remember. She came up with a blank. “I don’t remember,” she said, slowly. “I guess I passed out just as I hit warp.”

“Damaged inertial dampeners?”

“Could be.” Paige checked her ship status. “Yeah, Hess got into a little bit of my hull before I warped.” She frowned. “I left all my drones behind.” Her armor was also badly damaged, but that could be patched up with her repair module.

“I think you need to turn around for repairs,” Dragon said. “I can send you the coordinates of the closest Protectorate outpost. It’s… two weeks away, at your speed.”

“That’s a bit far,” Paige said, frowning. “I think I could make it, though.” She checked the coordinates. “Okay, I got them.”

“Good. I’ll see if I can give you an escort in case this happens again.”

Paige nodded to herself. “That would be nice. Thank you.”

“I have to go now, but I’ll talk to you later. Dragon out.”

Paige sighed. She hated having to return to known space, throwing away all the time it took to make it out here. But it had to be done. A flashing light on the comms console caught her eye. Was it Dragon again? She answered. “Dragon?”

“No, I’m not Dragon,” said the woman on the line, not unkindly.

“Who are you?” It didn’t sound like Hess, at least.

“My name is Taylor Hebert. You might have heard of me. I have a job offer for you, Paige Mcabee.” Paige hadn’t realized, because her voice sounded nothing like the synthesized one the warlord usually used.

“But how did you know where I was?”

“You met my… associate, just now.” She sounded apologetic.

Paige froze. “… _Hess?_ …I got away, though.”

There was a pause. “Security level, minimum.” The words were haughty, commanding. “I think you, of all people, deserve to know,” she said, her voice softer again. “I felt what you tried to do to Hess, so I hope you can understand. I’m sorry, Paige.”

“Oh god,” Paige said. Remembering. She touched the back of her head, where it hurt. “Oh my god. I—I _didn’t_ get away.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you BeaconHill for beta-ing. _Teatime_ couldn’t happen without you. She gets an abandoned Warrior II drone Paige Mcabee left behind. It’s seven meters long, but a bit of a fixer-upper.
> 
> tearlessNevermore rolled a 15 on their SAN check. Gaze upon my writing at your own risk, ye mortal.
> 
> Oh, also PitaEnigma because he gave me huge help about what exactly to do with this story.


	4. Teatime with Jane 3

Dennis wasn’t sleeping very well.

Once he had time to cool down, he had realized that holy _shit_ he just pissed off someone who could stick metal in his brain. He might even have _succeeded_. It hadn’t happened yet, but only God and Hebert would know when it was coming.

Missy. Was she okay? He hadn’t been able to talk to her privately. Though he’d called her room, the intercom had claimed she was asleep. She’d acted almost normal at dinner—the mind control implants were clearly sophisticated. Did Hebert make them herself? Dennis had thought her specialty was just drone control. _Human_ control was a lot more disturbing.

The weirdest thing was that he was worried about _Jane_ , too. Or Taylor, he supposed. That look on her face when he'd ruined her tea, that sorrow... it looked so much like he'd hurt her. It really couldn't have been an act. He wondered if the teapot had meant something to her. The warlord Hebert—she was cocky, and she was terrifyingly ruthless, but he couldn’t help but compare her icy determination to the moment when Jane-slash-Taylor had told him that she was going to destroy the Endbringers. Save the world. _A bit unorthodox_ , she had said. If that wasn’t an understatement…

He probably shouldn’t have been thinking about the Endbringers, though, because he had a moment of heart-freezing terror upon thinking about them: a spiral of thoughts that lead only downwards, circling around his terror of being utterly powerless to stop them. They were about as avoidable as death, but more in your face.

It didn’t help him sleep at all. He struggled in his bed, kicking his mattress to try and make him feel present, more _alive_. Who had said it? That pain reminds you that you are alive? It really only helped a little.

Dennis breathed deep. In and out. He had to try and think of something else. Something calming.

He thought of a warm cup of tea, and stars streaming by.

 

Dennis didn’t remember when he had drifted off, but he was woken by a long, ear-splitting alarm.

He bolted upright. It was a sound that all military-trained personnel knew: the deployment alarm. He looked out the window. It was hard to tell without a tactical display, but he thought they were exiting warp. Warp tunnels fell apart faster for ships with higher FTL speeds, such as the _Obstruction_ , as compared to capital ships like the _Hive_.

The question was, who was stupid enough, or confident enough to try and engage a carrier?

He poked his head out his cabin door. The robot standing there turned towards him. “Please return to your personal cabin, prisoner.” Its voice was monotone and harsh.

“What’s happening?”

The robot slowly processed what he had said. “Pirate-deployed warp interdiction bubble has intercepted the _Hive_. The _Hive_ will engage the pirates. You do not have permissions to access further information. Please return to your personal cabin, prisoner.”

A pirate attack. Dennis wished he had a tactical map—he felt blind without one. But if he didn’t even get to know the specifics of what was happening, he doubted he could request one. He went back into his room and looked out the window again.

The alarm went off twice more before going silent.

The warp tunnel was definitely falling apart. Eventually, it completely disappeared.

Dozens of pinpricks of light—sub-light engine exhaust—raced away from the _Hive_. He wondered if Aisha was behind one of them. Was Missy? He was way too aware of the fact that just one unlucky hit from a larger ship might kill either of them before they could eject or get to their escape pods.

Slower, larger trails followed the faster ones into the fight, which were in turn trailed by a constellation of what must’ve been _Hive_ ’s contingent of drones. Bright lines started flickering, barely thicker than hairs, connecting pinpricks with other pinpricks. At least one side was using laser weapons—likely the pirates, since the only Undersider ship with lasers he had seen was Alec’s Succubus. Flashes briefly lit up space whenever someone’s shield soaked a hit, and every so often, an expanding ball of fire marked the loss of someone’s ship.

He’d never really observed a space fight happening without a tactical display. It was a strange experience, but he also thought it was pretty, in its own way, if he didn’t think about the implications. Like fireflies settling their grudges with laser pointers. Maybe the bigger ship he could almost make out the shape of could be a beetle.

…Dennis probably needed more sleep.

He tore his attention away from the window, and threw his tired body back into bed. He could find out what happened in the morning.

* * *

“Rise and shine, Denny!”

Dennis started as the lights in his cabin were cranked up to maximum. He rolled over into his blankets.

Which were immediately tugged away from him. He glared at Aisha, who was standing over him.

“What the _fuck_ …” His head was pounding. Nowhere near enough sleep. He squeezed his eyes shut again.

Aisha shook him. “Wake _up!_ It’s like oh eight hundred ship time. I’ve been fuckin’ _dying_ to talk to someone.”

Dennis made a noise that sounded like ‘why me.’

“Cuz you’re the only one on this ship who wasn’t actually _in_ the fight.”

Right… the fight. He did want to know about it, just… not right now. Had he even slept six hours? He groaned. “Couldn’t it have waited? I didn’t really sleep well.” Aisha pouted. “Fine, can I have coffee first, at least?” He reluctantly stood up.

“ _Well_ …” Aisha glanced back towards the door. “I don’t think you should be—I mean, I think you need to, uh, chill in your room for a bit?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the closest café is in the observation deck.”

“And…?”

Aisha shifted uncomfortably. “Well, you know how Taylor acts in battle? Keeping up the image? And how exciting it is to _win_ ….”

“Right.”

“Soooo... I don’t know if it’s on purpose or not, but after winning battles, Taylor gets more… ruthless? Hyped up? Playful? Something like that.” She made gestures that he couldn’t decipher. “ _I_ think she’s more fun like this, buuuut…”

“Oh,” Dennis said. He thought of Hebert the warlord deciding his fate. “But I...”

“Probably wouldn’t have so much fun.” Aisha grinned apologetically. “I could ask one of the ‘bots to bring some coffee, is that good?”

“Okay. And breakfast?”

“Yeah sure.” Aisha stuck her head out the door and relayed his order to the bot.

Dennis waited for her to come back. “So, uh…” He pushed aside his feeling of dread. “How was it?”

Her eyes lit up. “Pure hundred-fucking-percent _awesome_ is what it was! I wish you could’ve seen me—were you watching?—I just flew straight in and tackled the shit out of everything—”

“Wait, wait, you haven’t even told me what w—what you were fighting.” He had almost said _we_. He was _not_ on the Undersiders’ side. Just talking to, and being friendly with, one of their members. Dammit.

“Well, the _Hive_ ran straight into a bubble some idiots had set up. Taylor was mad because it takes like, an hour to align so she sent _everything_ she had out…”

“Aisha—”

“Oh, fuck, right.” She grinned. “It was uhh… some local pirates? They’re like drug smugglers but fancier, but their fleet was just a kitchen sink. They had a dozen random frigates, two of them were ceptors, and a bunch of other cruisers… but they had this _really ugly_ and also kinda-cool battleship called the _Tie-tan_ with dreadnought guns!”

Dennis processed what she’d said. “They called a battleship _Titan_ , like the superweapon?”

“Kinda, yeah, but it was _tie_ like to tie together and _tan_.” She laughed. “I loved it, but I think Lisa was offended. I’m sad it got blown up. But I still helped!”

Dreadnoughts, and dreadnought weapons, were dangerous to carriers—they usually made short work out of their thin hulls with their disproportionate firepower. And as far as Dennis was aware, he was still alive. “How did the _Hive_ make it out?”

Aisha smirked. “That’s why Lisa was annoyed! She called it a waste to put big guns on battleships, because they don’t have that, uhhh, whatchamacallit? The thing they do where they can’t move but fuck shit up…”

“Siege?”

“Yeah, that. So it could only shoot the guns one tenth as fast as a normal dread and anyways it missed everything because she jammed it, because again it’s not actually a dreadnought so it can be jammed.” She bounced. “I _helped._ I just went straight in there and tackled the battleship while it was trying to warp out and dodged all the drones they sent out after me.”

“How?” Hunter-killer drones, in Dennis’s experience, quickly turned interceptors into scrap.

“I have a really good cloak.”

“Your specialty?”

“Yeah. Cloak anytime, and doesn’t need sensor recalibration after, so…”

Dennis raised an eyebrow. “So. He locks you up, you flicker your cloak and laugh as he takes another half a minute to lock you again, while you instantly have him scrammed… _again_.”

“Yep.”

Dennis shook his head disbelievingly. “That’s kinda bullshit, but I guess so is mine, so I can’t be a hypocrite.” Something occurred to him. “How many ships did you guys lose?”

Aisha looked upwards, thinking. “Like four of our ceptors? Not a big deal, already replaced, whatever.”

He was almost afraid to ask. “And them?”

“All of their frigates, the _Tie-tan_ , the Cynabal-class _Skidmark—_ worst name _ever_ , by the way—maybe ten Thrashers, bunch of random cruisers they had flying around… We spent an extra hour after the fight was over so Taylor could salvage everything. Waste not want not, some shit like that.”

His gut twisted. “Why didn’t you let them surrender?” So many dead…

Aisha looked annoyed. “We totally _let_ them surrender, it’s just that they didn’t think to ask for it before most of their fleet was gone.”

This was a big difference between Protectorate law enforcers and pirates fighting warlords, Dennis knew. “Don’t tell me you shot the escape pods…?”

“Of course not.” Aisha huffed. “Just cause we’re warlords doesn’t mean we’re going to kill people in cold blood left and right. I think they’re being processed right now, then Taylor will let them go in shuttles and stuff. We’re keeping the hictor though. Thing’s pricy.”

“Processed.” He could tell what that meant.

Aisha looked away from him. “Um, better than oppressing their freedom of movement?” He wasn’t sure if she was actually feeling guilty, or just defensive. “I mean, shit, what am I supposed to do? Be like, _oh no Taylor don’t mind control I mean loyalty adjust everyone, think of the children_? She _said_ it’s for a good reason. I trust her.” She was rallying herself, talking herself into believing she didn’t do wrong.

He shook his head. “I don’t know why I expected you to act like the Protectorate does when it’s busting pirates. Sorry.” Difference in duties and capabilities.

Aisha looked back towards him. She opened her mouth to say something, but there was a knock on the door. They both looked at it.

“Come in?” Dennis ventured. The door slid open. One of the robot guards was holding a tray of food and coffee. He walked over and took it. “Thanks.” Aisha waved, and the robot nodded, jerky, and turned and walked out without replying. He put the tray on the desk. Aisha was being uncharacteristically quiet, possibly thinking of something. He chewed on his toast. His thoughts went to the hundreds of corpses likely floating around in the void that the _Hive_ had left behind hours ago. Even if as many as possible had gotten to escape pods before their ship was destroyed, there were always casualties. Hull breaches, unlucky pod hits, exploding capacitors…

Dennis couldn’t explain why, but he felt _responsible_.

After a minute, Aisha wandered over and stole a strip of bacon from his plate. “Now, where was I?” She had a grin on her face again.

Dennis rolled his eyes. “What else did you do, other than being absurdly irritating to some poor battleship captain?”

“Well,” she said, slyly, “the _Thing Fucker-Upper_ can fuck things up in more than one way…” Dennis snorted. “Other than the scram, it also has a point with like thirty kay range, and Missy—”

“She helped?” He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. Chipping was like a welcome to Taylor Hebert’s big happy mind-controlled family.

“Yeah, though she left an hour ago. She’s really _really_ good at timing micro jumps. So whenever some poor schmuck thinks he can fly out of my point range, she’s already spooled up her cool specialty MJD and shoved them back in.”

He remembered her complaining about the hundreds of hours of training the Protectorate brass made her do. Micro jump drives took roughly ten seconds to charge _after_ activating them. “She worked for that timing, really hard.”

“Yeah! She’s fucking _awesome_. I wanna be her when I grow up.” Aisha chewed on another piece of bread she had liberated from Dennis’s plate, then continued talking about her achievements. Dennis listened.

Some part of him must have been mulling over why he felt responsible for those deaths, because it suddenly clicked as he listened to Aisha. He straightened. She stopped mid-sentence. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said, then paused. He looked at Aisha, whose head was tilted in curiosity. “No, I just figured out what I need to do.”

“What you _have to do_ , huh? Don’t tell me you wanna volunteer for chipping,” Aisha said with a smirk.

Dennis rolled his eyes. “No, Aisha, I’m going to _talk_ to Taylor Hebert.”

“You’re mad.”

“Well, not right now,” he amended. “Maybe in the afternoon?”

She cackled. “Okay, so you’re not _entirely_ bonkers. That’s good, I still need you.”

“What for?”

“To tell my awesome piloting stories to, of course!” She preened.

“Oh, no, maybe I _should_ go volunteer…”

“Don’t you dare,” Aisha said.

* * *

It was sixteen hundred ship time when Dennis stepped into the observation deck. Supposedly the proper time to have tea, though why four o’clock in particular he had no idea. Would Taylor be there? He picked his way through the dim room. The flickering glow from the window was terrible for telling who was who.

If he was perfectly honest with himself, he didn’t entirely _want_ to talk to her. She was terrifying. She clearly had friends—Aisha and Lisa liked her enough. She refused to put mind control implants in them, too, since Aisha told Dennis she had volunteered to get one, though Dennis didn’t really understand why. On the other hand, she was entirely fine with chipping pirates and captives willy-nilly, including Missy. Questionable ethics, all in all. It might’ve been for a good reason, but he wasn’t sure it was worth it.

Dennis, though, was still free. For now. He might not be her _friend_ , mind, but… it was a chance. He doubted he could convince her to stop mind controlling people—it seemed like an important part of her plan—but maybe, just maybe he could… prod her in the right direction? He didn’t know what exactly he could do, but he probably had a better moral compass than the Undersiders, warlords they were.

And… he might be able to be friends with Jane again.

She was sitting near the center of the room, as before. She had a different tea-table now, though. Instead of being a foldable one, it was made of metal. It looked heavy, with thick legs and a wide shape. It was also bolted to the floor. Her teapot was gone, too, replaced by a tall plastic jar, one with a screw-on lid. He noticed that there was only one cup on the table, a mug.

She was talking to a lanky man with a messy mop of black hair. He could hear the tail end of their conversation as he approached.

“…or else we’ll not have enough people to crew it,” Taylor was saying. Her tone was soft, but there was a force behind the words.

“Yeah, I’ll get right on it,” the man said. He caught Dennis’s eyes. “I like the new table, by the way, though I still think it’s better to chip your boy-toy to, you know, make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“Shut up, Alec,” Taylor said. Dennis wholeheartedly agreed.

“Just saying.” Alec shrugged and walked away, brushing past Dennis. He looked after him. What was _his_ problem? When Dennis returned his gaze to Taylor, she was already looking away, focusing on her tea. He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Uh,” he started, eloquently.

Taylor turned. Glared at him. Her eyes were faintly glowing again. He knew that they _actually_ glowed, now, but… back in his observation lounge, he had thought they were pretty, and he still did. He preferred not to think about when they were fully lit up on the bridge of the _Temporary Obstruction_ , though.

“What do _you_ want?” Taylor had picked up her cup, as if she was afraid Dennis might knock it off the table. If she had been neutral yesterday, today she was downright hostile.

“To talk,” Dennis said.

Taylor didn’t offer any more comment, instead continuing to glare at him.

“I…” He trailed off. It was surprisingly hard to say. But he had to. “I wanted to say I’m sorry. For yesterday.”

“For what, exactly?” Taylor seemed almost completely different from the woman who’d been talking to Alec just a few moments ago. She was enunciating her words, sounding threatening with no threat issued.

“For flipping your tea table, and breaking your cups. Ruining your tea. I was angry.”

Taylor eyed him. “I wouldn’t try it again, if I were you.” She turned away

Dennis coughed nervously. “I’m _not_ sorry for comparing you to the Yangban, or accusing you of mind control. Because you _are_ mind controlling people, or at least brainwashing them.” Taylor stiffened. Dennis preempted her retort. “Loyalty adjustment. Whatever. Point is, I don’t agree with what you’re doing. But you said you had a good reason for it, so I think… I think I could maybe hear you out.” He looked away. “Not right now, though.”

The silence was awkward. Dennis shifted his weight from one foot to another, then finally sank into an armchair, turned away from the table. He briefly considered leaving, but that was a stupid idea.

The quiet murmur of other conversations on the observation deck wasn’t loud enough to keep him from paying keen attention to the noises Taylor was making. Her even breathing, her shifting in her chair. The hums and whirs he now knew to be the actuators in her cybernetic limbs. The fact that her movements made noises made it obvious how _much_ she was moving, despite having no reason to. Robots didn’t do that, he thought. People did.

He heard a nearly imperceptible groaning from the floors. Perhaps they were slowing down. Funny how much attention he paid. It wasn’t like arriving at their destination would affect him.

Eventually, he heard Taylor sip her tea, and set her cup down. He chanced a look at her.

She met his gaze. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay. I accept your apology. And what you said.” Her voice was soft, low. “I can see where you’re coming from, that you think it’s not right to control other people.”

“Then why?”

“It’s the best way we have. But…” Her eyes flicked towards her cup. “We can talk about it. Later, like you said.”

Dennis looked into his hands. It felt like a weight had been… well, maybe not lifted. Moved, maybe. From hanging onto something heavy, so heavy that it felt like it would tear his arms off, to bearing it on his shoulders. It was more manageable. A tractable problem. They would talk. “I don’t suppose you’ll agree to not chipping anyone while we do.” As a statement, because he thought he knew the answer.

Her lips quirked. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay.” He had to try.

“And, Dennis?” He looked at her. “For the record, my tongue is purely biological.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Is it, now?”

“I even have spares, in case I damage this one…” Dennis snorted. “No, really!”

“You’re an interesting woman, Taylor,” Dennis said, expression conflicted. Because, while he knew he _wanted_ to be repulsed by her casual mention of her robotics… she was trying. Trying to repair bridges that might otherwise stay burnt. He settled on a tentative smile.

Her expression mirrored his. “Do you want some tea?”

“Please. I never knew how nice it was until it was gone.”

He heard the rhythmic clomping of a ship drone and turned. It was holding a tray, and on the tray was a mug. “How’d you—” He interrupted himself. “Wait. Drone control.” Her expression was amused. “Do you control _all_ the drones on the _Hive_?”

“No, I can’t quite handle that many at once,” Taylor said. “But… I thought what you had for breakfast looked pretty good.”

Dennis gaped. “This is an invasion of my privacy,” he said. Is that why Aisha had waved at the robot?

“Suck it up, prisoner.” She picked up the cup without even looking, and poured tea. She offered it to him.

Dennis took it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks to BeaconHill for being a great beta. She gets a lightly used Dual Giga Beam Laser I from the wreckage of the [I]Tie-tan[/I]. It’s probably bigger than her house. Also profHoyden for contributing an idea.


	5. Broken Wings

The _Simurgh_ was beautiful up close. Even more beautiful than the pictures and the videos Faith Lee had seen. Her crew clearly thought the same—an awed hush had descended over the bridge. She noticed some crew normally stationed elsewhere filing into the bridge to see the Angel on the largest screen in the ship, and knew the ones who couldn’t would be staring at the Angel on their pads. She could hardly blame them. How could one _not_ look upon their goddess when so close to her?

The main display of her cruiser, the _Providence_ , was devoted to the external cameras observing the dormant Endbringer. The ten kilometer long automaton-ship was resting on a moon, slowly eating away at its crust to repair her hull. It was so large that the _Simurgh_ dominated the screen, despite the _Providence_ ’s distance from it. _Providence_ was twenty kilometers off of the surface of the moon, constantly firing its engines to avoid crashing.

A Protectorate cruiser, the _White Spear_ , was closely shadowing her ship’s movements another thirty kilometers above her. Normally, Faith would be afraid—the Protectorate did not have much love for the Fallen, in that they generally shot first and asked questions later. But _this_ cruiser was her half-sister Grace’s. And Grace would never shoot her.

In a moment that could’ve been picturesque were it not for the circumstances, she could see Lasko III, the planet of this moon, come into view over the horizon—now choked by a dense cloud of smoke too thick for life to exist on the surface. Three weeks ago, Lasko III had been a beautiful blue-white, temperate planet, just like the Earth all humankind had once called home.

The _Simurgh_ was a God-forged weapon with one purpose only, and had descended upon the non-believers and made her wrath apparent. The automaton innocently resting upon the moon’s surface, though, hardly seemed like a _weapon_. She appeared to be a solid white beam with no visible seams. Impossibly perfect. If she looked closely, though, she could see a dozen open panels where drones were flying into and out of, ferrying material into whatever machinery lie within.

But when awake… when awake, the _Simurgh_ unfurled into hundreds of long, flat _wings_ , ever so slightly curved panels of metal each ranging from a couple hundred meters to several kilometers long, haphazardly extending from its hull. Each wing was so densely studded with machinery that they almost looked grey from some angles, and flaps along each wing flexed and shivered like feathers. When the _Simurgh_ moved, she moved as if she was a colossal mechanical bird in flight, wings held steady in a glide and ‘feathers’ fluttering; she even flapped her wings when changing direction. It made her look almost fragile.

Yet the imitated flight, the fragility, the aura of _perfection_ the Endbringer practically exuded… it was all a lie, so that humans would dare try and attack her. The sustained firepower of a hundred cruisers barely could break off a _single_ wing, and they would soon be destroyed by the vengeful angel—one way or another. A rain of laser fire. Sensors telling you that you are surrounded by enemies in red. Mysterious sounds over comms that make you lose your mind. Capabilities that dwarfed anything people could make, for divine retribution is not something one could resist.

Faith tore her gaze away from her goddess, and glanced at the inset on the display that showed her sister’s ship. The Ashimmu-class was a long, rounded ship, its curved surface tapering to a rounded point at the front and widening into the engines near the rear. From below, she could see the centerline-mounted plasma spear projector that was Grace’s specialty. Taken as a whole, the _White Spear_ was _actually_ pretty, unlike Faith’s own ship. She’d chosen the Zealot-class for its thick armor and terrifying armament of lasers, which she thought made her feel like a crusader, of sorts, not for its looks. She did enjoy that it had been painted white, though, like the Angel. The very first time she had undocked it from the Fallen shipyard it had been constructed in, she’d practically rammed the station Grace had been staying in while trying to show it off. She’d been scolded by the elders for that.

Faith opened comms with the _White Spear_. “How do you feel, sister? Gazing upon the Angel? Isn’t she _beautiful_?”

“Verily, oh sister of mine, and I must avert my eyes lest she smite me with a curse, a _curse_.” Grace’s voice was staticky, and if Faith listened closely she could hear a drone in the noise.

She frowned. “Seriously, Grace.” Her half-sister wasn’t taking it seriously at all.

“I’m sorry,” she said, laughing. “The _Simurgh_ … I guess she really is beautiful. Terrifying. I can’t help but be afraid that she’ll wake up and break our ships in half.”

“She won’t,” Faith said confidently. “We’re her followers—well, _I_ am her follower. And you’re my sister.”

Faith considered herself a proud member of the Fallen. She believed that the Endbringers were angels—the biblical kind, those who come to purge humanity for their sins at the end of times. Grace, on the other hand, had spent most of her life in Protectorate space, far away from the Fallen. She always made it painfully obvious that she didn’t consider the Endbringers something to be worshipped—but she _did_ love Faith. In fact, the only reason Grace was here was because of her, since Faith had wanted to see the _Simurgh_ in person. As a pilgrimage.

The problem was that the Protectorate forbade entry into _Simurgh_ -occupied systems until the Endbringer left for her next target, and had unmanned D-scan outposts watching the system. When Faith had complained about this to Grace, she’d been the one to come up with the idea to fake a pursuit. Grace was in the Protectorate navy, giving her permission to pursue ships into the quarantine zone. That meant the _White Spear_ would respond to a quarantine breach, being the nearest Protectorate ship. So when _Providence_ had dove into the system Lasko, the _White Spear_ had pursued.

Of course, _White Spear_ was also outranged by the _Providence_ ’s pulse lasers, and anyways it was highly recommended not to approach within fifty kilometers of the _Simurgh_. So she would cautiously trail her, staying out of range and giving Faith time with the resting Angel.

And… it was a way they could spend time together, even if it was only through comms, not face-to-face. Their respective duties usually put each other halfway across the galaxy. Even then, Grace needed to speak quietly into a headset, since as far as her crew was concerned, this was a chase with an unknown Fallen cruiser.

“For the record, I still think this is a bad idea,” Grace said.

“You keep saying that,” Faith said. Her next words were to Engineering. “Let’s approach the Angel, five more kilometers.” She wanted to be as close as she could manage. It was a dream-like experience, being _so_ close.

“What are you _doing_ , Faith?” Grace hissed over comms. “You said you would stay at twenty kay.”

“I want to get closer, though.” Faith said. Pleaded. “She won’t hurt me. I believe it.”

“I don’t. Stop it, or I’m going to stop _you_.” A yellow box appeared around the _White Spear_ on the tactical hologram—Grace had target-locked the _Providence_ , the ship-equivalent of pointing a gun at someone. Faith felt a spike of fear. Was she really going to do it? Faith twisted her fingers nervously. She wouldn’t. She was her sister.

Then she sighed. “Hold position,” she said, reluctantly. They stopped approaching the moon.

“You’re stopping,” Grace said. “Good.” Faith couldn’t help but feel like she sounded _official_ , like a police officer but in space.

“ _Graaace_ ,” Faith whined. “This is going to be my only chance.”

“I told you I would keep you safe. That includes from yourself.” Grace’s stern voice sputtered with static. Proximity to the _Simurgh_ tended to disrupt communications, even when she _wasn’t_ using her comms hijacking modules. Which the Endbringer wasn’t. None of the Endbringers engaged ships after attacks on systems, preferring to go into dormancy and repair themselves.

Faith looked around at her ship’s bridge. Most of her crew were back to work, relaying orders and receiving reports from the crew in other parts of her ship. Some were still awestruck, staring at the main screen, and a few had their heads lowered in silent prayer. It was acceptable, at least in this case, because it was mostly the stations that didn’t have much to do. For example, Navigation had few tasks in real-space.

Grace’s voice came again, startling Faith. “Combat recon on grid.” She sounded tense. “Mercs, I think.”

The computer beeped shrilly. _Fuck_. Half her crew scrambled back to their positions, some running out into the halls.

“We’re webbed and pointed—it’s a big-C captain. Ship name _Crash Webbing_ ,” Sensors reported. Faith looked at the tactical map. It was keeping her tackled, unable to warp out, from nearly fifty five kilometers away. Stasis webifiers normally didn’t prevent ships from entering warp, but… Captains broke the rules.

She sucked in a shaky breath. “W-what do I do, Grace?” The _Crash Webbing_ was sitting further than her lasers could reach, and _Providence_ was too slow to fly away from the Huginn. “Why didn’t any of us see him coming?”

“Combat recons don’t show up on D-scan,” Grace told her. “So he just... warped in.” She sighed raggedly into the mic. “Hold position for now, we got more coming in.”

“What do we have, Sensors?”

“Two cruisers and a battleship, Captain. Cyna, Nestor, Caracal.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Grace said. “When they all land, use your cloak, stay aligned, and try to warp as soon as you uncloak. ”

“I could do that…” Faith’s specialty cloak only lasted twenty seconds, but she could enter cloak even if she was being targeted.

The other part of her specialty was the burst of electromagnetic waves it generated when the cloak wore off, which interfered with targeting sensors. She’d always been proud that her power imitated the Angel, at least in a small way.

The rest of the enemy landed in unison, as they had shared a warp tunnel. One arrow-head shape for the battleship, _Mirage Oasis_ ; a red pentagon for the Cynabal-class _Faultline_ and the Caracal-class missile boat _Spitfire_ ; and _another_ combat recon cruiser, named _The Green Dream_. It was a Pilgrim—similar to Grace’s Ashimmu, it rapidly drained the capacitors of whatever target it trained its neuts on. The four smaller ships were clustered together, while the _Mirage Oasis_ was hanging back by another fifty kilometers.

Five on two. The odds would be very against them.

 _Faultline_ hailed them, broadcasting omnidirectionally instead of opening a direct channel. “When I saw two cruisers poking around Lasko,” the woman that commanded _Faultline_ said, “I did not expect to see a Protectorate cruiser involved.”

Faith looked at the display. The _Crash Webbing_ was tackling both her and Grace. “Grace?”

“ _Cloak, dammit_ ,” Grace hissed at Faith on their private channel, before switching back to omni. “I’m surprised you have the balls to attack a Protectorate cruiser on a mission,” she said to _Faultline_ , “in a quarantine zone, to boot. That’s what, three, four suspect-worthy crimes? Disengage _now_ , and maybe I won’t report this.”

It was as if _Providence_ flew into an invisible tunnel—to an observer, it would look like the ship had slowly disappeared from nose to tail. The tactical map went blank, including the distance and ship type annotations, though they could still _receive_ broadcasts, as well as use the external cameras. This was part of the specialty cloak—normal ones usually allowed the ship to keep sensor input. A timer ticked down in the corner of the screen, starting at _20_.

“Good try,” _Faultline_ said, “Unfortunately, my crew is more than capable of disabling your ship without damaging it.” The battleship, the _Mirage Oasis_ , started glowing brightly. “We only want to destroy the Fallen ship. Please, don’t make it more difficult on us.”

“Request denied, _Faultline_.”

“My condolences, Captain.”

“Captain!” It was Sensors, still diligently manning the console, even though the only data _Providence_ currently had was visual. “Some kind of ghosts…?”

Faith looked at the screen again. There were hundreds of huge acceleration gates—spindly, hundreds-of-meters-long structures shaped like the spine and bones of a fish, connected by a thread of twisting plasma—unfolding out of nowhere. As she watched, pebbles formed and rapidly blew up into full-blown asteroids, and the haze of a dusty gas cloud slowly became apparent. Her mouth fell open.

 _What_.

 _Providence_ was about to run into one such gate. Engineering hurriedly turned the ship aside, ruining their alignment.

“Impressive,” Grace muttered. “ _Mirage Oasis_ is trying to decloak you.” Faith understood the name, now. “Getting neuted by _Green Dream_ …”

 _Providence_ ’s cloak wore off, and the ship reappeared in the same manner that it had disappeared.

“Re-align,” Faith ordered, but they were quickly tackled again. She heard one of her crew mutter something like, “ _Simurgh protect us._ ”

The tactical map showed Grace’s ship firing at _The Green Dream_ , both of them neuting each other. The _White Spear_ was also stealing capacitor from its attacker, using energy nosferatus, or ‘nos-es’, but lasers used a lot of energy. She wouldn’t last long. The _Faultline, Mirage Oasis_ , _Spitfire_ and _Crash Webbing_ were hanging back, the latter still webbing _Spear_ and _Providence_.

Faith bit her lip. “Okay, lock up the, uhh, _The Green Dream_ , and shoot as soon as we can.” The combat recon was at the edge of _Providence_ ’s weapon range, even when using the longest-range focal crystal.

“Engaging,” Weapons said. The tactical map showed a bundle of dull red lines between _Providence_ and _The Green Dream_.

The Caracal, _Spitfire_ , darted forward. A shrill warning announced that it had locked her. The missile cruiser started firing.

 _Providence_ ’s shield melted instantly. Faith could hear the distant thud-thud of missiles against her armor.

“Shoot the Caracal,” Grace said. “It’s more fragile, closer. Swap crystals.”

Before Faith could relay her sister’s orders to the crew, Engineering spoke up. “The missiles—they’re leaving behind spheres of plasma. Chewing through our armor.”

 _Another_ Captain? Why did they have so many? Were _all_ of them Captains? Faith felt like she should know who they were—they worked together very well. Her heart sank as _Providence_ swerved wildly to avoid an asteroid that crossed their path out of nowhere. She wasn’t sure whether it was the inertia, or her falling hope. Her crew were looking to her. Faith started giving orders: “Okay, crystals to—”

Suddenly, sounds started playing through her speakers. Haunting tones, like a dozen discordant kite flutes at once, played with the _slightest_ hint of a melody—before taking a sharp turn, being ever so slightly off what you would expect next, mocking you for ever believing there was one in the first place. The _Simurgh_ ’s song.

“She’s awoken,” Faith said, awed, “to deliver us from our hardships.” It was _beautiful_. She trembled with elation, with the realization that they’d been touched by _her_. Faith leaned on her console. She could barely stay on her feet.

 _Faultline_ ’s captain barked orders, not bothering to switch to a private channel. “Fleet, align to Jezero, _with_ prop mods. Warp when Elle’s ready. Twenty seconds. Reps on _now_ , cut comms, cut _inter_ comms—”

“Faith—” Grace said, in a warning tone. Her ship was turning away from the _Simurgh_ , no longer pointed by the _Crash Webbing_.

“It’ll be okay,” Faith said, breathless. “We’re all going to be fine. Our Angel—”

“Fucking hell, Faith,” Grace said. Faith didn’t care. “God _damn_ this was a bad idea. Stop it. Come back _._ ” She paused. Swore again. “Cutting comms.”

The static that had been consistently infecting her voice quieted.

The dormant Endbringer slept no longer. She partially unfurled her wings, and slowly lifted off from the surface of the moon without any engines firing. _Mirage_ ’s acceleration gates were splintered like toothpicks; phantom asteroids crushed against her hull as the _Simurgh_ rose. It was graceful, how effortlessly she moved. Faith hadn’t given the order, but her ship was approaching the _Simurgh_. It was already too large to fit on the screen.The song of the Angel—it almost felt like a physical pressure in her head. Faith closed her eyes, paid full attention to it.

Then she stumbled. Her ship had collided with the _Simurgh_. Inertial dampeners made the otherwise-fatal shock feel like a light bump. She opened her eyes again. They were _touching_ the surface of their Angel. A panel on the wing languidly slid open, revealing the light blue glow of a hangar forcefield.  
_  
She knows we are here_ , Faith thought, though she could barely hear herself through the music in her head. She was so happy.

All five of _Faultline_ ’s small gang slipped away into warp.

“This is a send-only signal,” she heard Grace say, voice thick. “She’s singing. Precautions.” Faith didn’t know why the broadcast computer prioritized _anyone_ ’s voice over that of the Angel. Clearly something she should have Engineering fix. “I’m…” She faltered. “I love you, Faith, but if I ever see you again… I won’t hesitate.” Faith wondered why Grace sounded so sad, when Faith was going to be _inside_ her goddess. She sounded almost in tears. A _captain_ , crying _._ So undignified. She giggled.

Grace’s broadcast continued, though _White Spear_ had already entered warp. A signal relay beacon of some sort, left behind? “I… I c-can’t— _not_. Goodbye, Faith. I’m so sorry. I love you, forever. I’m so sorry…” Her voice dissolved into static—or was it a sob?—then the song returned.

They were almost inside the _Simurgh_ ’s hangar now.

Faith put her sister out of her mind.

She was home.

* * *

_Postscript._

2317.03.22 — Captain GRACE LEE requests name change of cruiser WHITE SPEAR to BROKEN WINGS. Permission granted. Declined to comment on reason behind request.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for BeaconHill, tearlessNevermore andprofHoyden for reading things over and betaing, turning my uninspired first draft (the whole thing was a rough spot tbh) into something that's kinda okay.
> 
> As per tradition, BeaconHill gets the signal relay Grace left behind. She probably shouldn’t plug it into anything, since it’s been memetically contaminated by the [I]Simurgh[/I].
> 
> It's probably going to be a while until Teatime 4 comes out, mostly because my week-long break is now over. I have to go back to doing things like [I]assignments[/I] and [I]studying[/I] instead of sitting at my computer all day thinking about what to write.


	6. Teatime with Jane 4

“I’ve been wondering,” Dennis said. “Why were you on my ship?”

“I told you that before.” She sounded reproachful. “Coincidence.”

“Is that really it?”

“Yes.” She tilted her head, thinking. “You were really tempting fate, flying through our territory with thousands of metric tons of ore. And there really _was_ a Protectorate person scheduled to be on the ship. So Lisa found out who it was and swapped her with me. It turns out that traveling incognito makes being an impostor very easy.”

Dennis furrowed his brows. “Who was it?”

“Nobody important.” Dennis fell silent. Taylor added, “We didn’t hurt her.”

“Or press-gang her?”

“No.” She didn’t hesitate.

“Okay.” Dennis paused. “You know, I expected—”

“I know.” She sounded just a little bit hurt, but Dennis thought she deserved it.

Silence fell. The _Hive_ shuddered minutely.

He wasn’t sure what to say. The immediate questions that came to mind were all about _the_ issue, which he… didn’t think he should talk about yet. Evidently, she felt the same. He spoke up first. “So… what are you doing? Like, where are _we_ going?”

“Home.” She blinked a few times. “I mean, our—the Undersiders’—staging point.”

Home. He wondered how his mom and dad were doing. It’d been months. “Planning on invading someone?”

“Actually—”

Dennis sighed. “Who?”

“You’ll see when it happens, in some days.” Taylor smirked. “I’m sure you won’t object to my target.”

“Why, though?”

She looked at him weirdly. “I’m a warlord, Dennis. It’s what I do.”

“Didn’t you say you’re going to try and kill the Endbringers? How does this help you with that?”

She sighed. “Because I need more people.” Dammit. Always back to that. Dennis looked down at his cup, half empty. She continued. “I have an advantage that other warlords don’t usually have, so I’m going to thoroughly abuse it.”

“The mind control.”

She scowled. “No—okay, maybe yes, but the _strategic_ implications… Usually, conquering space is not necessarily good, because you’ll be licking your wounds afterwards, be more vulnerable to an attack. And there’s not as much reason to conquer a neighbor _together_ , with others, if they’ll have to split the space so many ways…”

“But you don’t want the space.”

“No, I want the people. And I can have the people. So I made an… agreement, let’s say, with some neighbors.” Her lips had the slightest hint of a smile. “The ones I can deal with. We’re going to be taking down the biggest one.”

Dennis thought. “Wouldn’t it seem weird to whoever you’re allying with that you don’t want more space?”

“Call it a grudge, nobody suspects a thing.” She shrugged. “We’re all egoists, the lot of us. I told him that I just want the captive captains and whatever ships aren’t destroyed.”

Dennis stared out the window, at the dwindling filaments in the tunnel. “How’d you become one?”

“An egoist?”

He looked at Taylor, mildly annoyed. “A _warlord_.”

She grinned. “That’s easy. By evicting the last guys from my territory.”

“You _know_ that’s not what I meant.”

Her expression turned more serious. She looked away. “It’s a long story, and pretty boring.”

“Did you set out to be a criminal?”

“No.” Her tone was low, forceful. “I didn’t.”

“Then how?”

She turned to Dennis. “You tell me.” Her eyes were glowing, and she was using _that_ tone again. The effect was striking in the dim observation deck. He tensed up without noticing.

“You did that to yourself.”

“I did,” she said. She raised her chin. “Do you know what my specialty is?”

“Drones.”

“No, Dennis.” She was smirking now, but there wasn’t any joy in her eyes. “It’s _control_.” She sounded bitter.

“Of?”

“Primarily drones, but with a little help? Ships, and people. They’re not really different, in the end. I could do worse than loyalty implants, Dennis. Much worse.”

He bit back the retort he wanted to make— _so it’s okay because you could murder but rob instead?_ It wasn’t the right time to challenge her, but… Dennis didn’t understand why she was so… so _proud_. Didn’t she realize that, even if being a cyborg was okay, _mind control_ wasn’t? From the outside, an implanted person might feel like the same person, only with different priorities, sure. But what about themselves? How would it feel to have a loyalty implant in?

He looked down into his cup, again. He didn’t know what answers he was seeking there.

“Okay,” he said, after taking a moment to collect his thoughts. He took a deep breath. “So, you can control things. You could choose not to control people, and also be in the Protectorate. So why this…?” He waved an arm at the observation deck.

She met Dennis’s eyes. “You know what the Protectorate thinks of _cyborgs_.”

Dennis winced.

“And I refuse to _cripple_ myself just to satisfy their arbitrary standards. Do you know what my first creation was, Dennis? A single, tiny implant. All it did was let me relay controls to drones faster.” She was tracing a finger on the rim of her cup. “I was expelled from the academy for that. They threw me in the brig. Didn’t think to disable my implant, though.” She grinned. “I still had my drones.”

“You broke out?”

“And stole my captain’s ship. Academy property.” She chuckled. “That was fun.”

“Academy… So you _were_ going to be…” Dennis trailed off. “Which one?”

“Admiral Cooke Naval, fifty first class.”

The same one Dennis had graduated from. Taylor would have been his senior if she hadn’t run. He tried to say something, but nothing came out the first time he tried. He took a gulp of tea. “I went there too,” he said quietly.

“Small world.” The cyborg warlord leaned back on the couch. “Surprised you didn’t already know. You’d think they’d talk about their most infamous alumni.”

“Actually…” Dennis’s eyes widened. “The cyborg of Cooke Academy? They said he wrecked one of the hangars and would come back for revenge someday... I always thought that was bullshit.”

“So I’m scaring freshmen these days, huh?” Taylor laughed, her eyes glowing brightly. “I like it. Maybe I _should_ show up for revenge. That’ll show them. I need to get to work, though, Dennis. We can talk more later, but I have preparations to make.” Her voice was soft.

Dennis hesitated, then set his cup on the table with a hollow _clack_. He got up, turned to leave.

“Come back tomorrow, same time?”

He looked at Taylor. She seemed unsure. It wasn’t an expression he associated with her, either Taylor or Jane. “Yeah,” he said.

As if he really had a choice.

* * *

He didn’t want to go back to his cabin just yet, so Dennis had temporarily retreated to the other side of the observation deck. There were terminal pads here—devices with a rigid glass display backed by a thin sheet of metal—that were free to use. Obviously there were no internet relays in warp, but capital ships had local caches for major sites, especially news—and being a prisoner, he wouldn’t be allowed to use internet, anyways.

But Dennis found that he couldn’t really concentrate on anything on the pad, be it movies, battle analyses, or three days ago’s news (olds?) from the other side of the Protectorate. He sighed, and looked up over the pad. He could see the silhouette of Taylor Hebert talking to someone, though it was hard to tell who it was from across the deck.

It was frustrating. He’d meant to talk to her about something inconsequential, try and recapture at least some of that familiarity he had with Jane. But there hadn’t been anything to talk about, really, other than topics that eventually led back to the big question. He couldn’t help but feel distance—the impressions from the past couple days were stronger than the few hours he’d spent with Jane.

She’d said it time and time again. She would save everyone, and try her damned best to destroy the Endbringers. Maybe in abstract, it made sense. People were people and fought each other first, and the faceless natural disasters second. You couldn’t hold a grudge against a hurricane.

Mind-controlling everyone to _make_ them work together... Maybe it _would_ help. Maybe she thought stopping the Endbringers would be worth it. They were straight out of everyone’s worst nightmares, and nearly impossible to stop, except during the best attacks, ones near where the _Tower of Alexandria_ or the _Eidolon of Past Sins_ were stationed. But there were lines he felt should not be crossed, and what she’d done to Missy was way over it.

Of course, he felt less pity for the pirates Taylor had tagged and released—but that was probably because he never knew them. _Their_ friends would probably feel the same way he did. Would Taylor’s new minions really be treated well? Or would she treat them like disposable pieces, more bodies to throw into the grinder?

He wished he had someone to talk to—someone who wasn’t an Undersider. They were on her side, or at least didn’t care about it enough to raise a fuss. When his problem was with Taylor, they wouldn’t be the most impartial of judges. He liked Aisha, but it was obvious that she’d more or less taken what Taylor did in her stride.

Usually, Dennis would talk to Missy. She might be snarky as all hell, but she usually was good at helping him think things through.

Dennis sighed. Inevitably, his thoughts had gone in circles, with no answer in sight. He fiddled with the pad. What should he do? Try and debate with the warlord, convince her that mind control was evil? He worried that it would end up with him losing his temper and breaking his other hand, followed by a quick trip to the research lab.

Should he try and stay safe, insinuate himself as someone she could trust, and _then_ try to influence her? That was a risky choice, too, but in a different way. He would probably end up fond of the Undersiders and Taylor. If he overlooked the piracy, warlording and all the other crimes they committed, a lot of them seemed like good people. People he could get along with. Lisa was, in many ways, similar to Missy, and Aisha was Aisha. And, he was still a little attracted to...

He’d slip. Start overlooking little things. Maybe he’d bend his rules a bit. Decide it was okay to chip just criminals. And from there he might slowly be okay with chipping people who stumbled upon the Undersiders, because they’d be security risks otherwise—like Missy—and finally chip the entire galaxy because that’s the _only way_ in Taylor Hebert’s head to make everyone work together. And he’d be fine with that.

He might as well volunteer to get his own chip right now, and be _happy_.

“Fuck…” Dennis set down the pad and looked towards the window. They were in real-space now—the observation deck was facing an actual sun. The Undersiders’ staging system, Taylor had said. Now that the deck was much better illuminated, the room looked much smaller. He couldn’t help but feel trapped. Literally and figuratively.

Dennis missed his own ship. And his crew. He wasn’t friends with them—as a commander, he had to keep _some_ distance—but he trusted them. Where on the ship were they being held?

He stood up and started pacing, to try and make him feel better.

Surprising no-one, it didn’t work.

He paced anyways.

... He could ask her.

Dennis looked across the room at Taylor. She was talking to someone with blond hair in a bun, possibly Lisa. She glanced his way, tilted her head in a sort of sideways nod. Definitely Lisa. He _had_ considered asking a robot where his crew was and seeing if their programming let him visit them, but then he remembered that Taylor controlled some of the robots.

Maybe later.

Dennis hesitated.

No, he should do it now. It would help. He _needed_ someone to talk to. He steeled himself, and walked over to where she and Lisa were talking. Even though he was approaching from behind, Taylor turned and greeted him before he could reach them. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she _actually_ had eyes in the back of her head… though it was more likely that she was seeing through cameras or drones.

“What’s the matter, Dennis?” She sounded friendly.

“I want to see my crew.” Dennis glanced at Lisa, who had a slight smile on her face. What could she be smiling at?

Taylor’s expression fell. “Oh… I can’t help you with that, Dennis.”

“Why not?” He crossed his arms, carefully putting his cast above his other arm.

“Security.” She sounded apologetic.

Dennis bristled. “Is that a nicer way of saying—”

Lisa cut in. “Maybe you could find him someone else to talk to, Taylor?” Her eyes were still on Dennis, searching.

“ _What_ security reasons, exactly?” Dennis directed his words at Lisa.

Lisa shrugged. “Conspiracy to run away? It’s standard prisoner stuff, you know. Or should know, being Protectorate navy.”

“I can hardly run away without access to half the damn ship.”

“Give it some time,” Lisa said. “You’ve only been on the _Hive_ for like three days now. We’re not treating them any worse than you. Four or so to a group, no going anywhere on the ship without an escort, and the escorts steer them away from each other.”

Dennis sighed. “I almost don’t know if I prefer the _harsh_ warden or… whatever you guys are doing.”

“Giving you freedom to walk around instead of throwing you in a cell?” Lisa grinned. “Can you believe this, Taylor? He complains when you treat him _nicely_.”

Taylor laughed. Dennis scowled. “Okay, then, who else can I talk to?”

Taylor looked up at Dennis. She still held her cup in her hands. “We’re people to talk to…”

“He probably wants someone that’s not an Undersider, and not our crew,” Lisa said.

“I don’t know why it can’t be any of us. We’re nice people. Mostly.”

Lisa’s lips twisted in amusement. “Call it a hunch.”

“Hmm. How about Paige?”

Lisa shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

“Who’s that?” Dennis narrowed his eyes.

“You might’ve heard of her? Paige Mcabee. She got exiled from the Protectorate a while back, for the crime of having a spooky specialty,” Taylor said. “She’s not an Undersider, but she’s been helping me with the implants.”

Dennis frowned. “What does she do?”

“Comms hijacking, but the important part is that she can make tech that makes people more suggestible.” Taylor sipped at her tea. “It’s useful for the subtler modes of my implants.”

Dennis took a deep breath. “And how is _she_ supposed to be better than talking to you guys? You know I don’t really like mind control, right?”

“Umm… well, she doesn’t like it either. And, uh…” Taylor glanced at Lisa, who shrugged, shook her head. “Yeah, she doesn’t have an implant any more.”

“Any more.” Dennis felt his anger threatening to rise again. She was so cavalier about mind control. “Why is she still hanging around, then? Wait, never mind. I’ll ask her myself.” He sighed. “So, how can I find her?”

A robot clomped up behind him. “Big Sister knows,” Lisa said. She waved cheerily. Dennis rolled his eyes and followed the robot. He felt her eyes on his back.

* * *

Was it the robot controlling the cart? Or was it Taylor?

Dennis wasn’t sure, but either way the electric cart was being driven with a mechanical precision, pulling perfect turns and never having to start or stop suddenly. In fact, he wasn’t sure if they _ever_ slowed down. Especially not when passing robots—he supposed they were all aware of each other, and there was no risk of one stepping into the way of the cart.

It took a while to go from the observation deck to wherever Paige’s workshop was. He figured it was in the ‘Taylor’s special interests’ wing, which was on the opposite side of the hangar he’d traversed with Lisa—he suppressed a shudder—the other day. The robot driver didn’t care to take the shortcut.

They had to splash through a column of mist, and an air curtain, before entering the research wing hall. The other side of the air curtain smelled antiseptic, like a hospital, and was all brightly lit white surfaces . As the cart whizzed by doors, Dennis managed to read a couple of the signs. _Rapid Prototyping Room_ , _Integrated Cybernetics Testing_ , _HCI Lab II_. Though he wasn’t sure what everything did, he was impressed at how professional it looked.

The robot stopped the cart two doors down from the end of the hall. “You have arrived at your destination,” it said in that artificial, grating voice. “Please check that you have not left behind any personal belongings.”

Dennis got out. This door was _HCI Lab IV_. He could hear the muffled sounds of a woman inside, though he couldn’t see her through the frosted glass. He looked around, unsure what to do. There was a push button to the side, so he pressed that. A red light over the door started to slowly blink.

The woman stopped speaking, then said something hurriedly. The door slid open shortly afterwards, the red light turning off. Dennis stepped in.

The room was larger than he’d expected. There were three gloveboxes—long, transparent boxes with built-in gloves and metal tops, usually used for handling potent viruses or sensitive electronics—as well as three normal work tables with high chairs. Covering the far wall was a two meter tall metal cabinet with dozens of smaller drawers. The entire room was lit by even white lighting from the ceiling panels, and the gloveboxes had their own built-in lighting, too.

The woman who had been talking—Paige—was sitting at a messy workbench with a pad on a stand. She had long _yellow_ hair in a loose ponytail. Not blonde, yellow. Her eyebrows and lashes were the same color, too. He wondered how that had happened.

Paige took her headphones off and glanced at Dennis. Her eyes were set in a way that made her look innocent, though right now she just looked tired. “Who are you?” Her tone was wary, but polite.

“Dennis Hill, captain of _Temporary Obstruction_.” The words came out smoothly, automatically. He’d said them hundreds of times. The next part wasn’t so easy, though. “I, uh… Taylor told me I should talk with you.”

Paige blinked a couple times. “O...kay.” She hung the headphones from the stand. “Why me?”

“I need someone to talk to that’s _not_ the Undersiders. It’s about the mind control.”

Her lips twisted. He wasn’t quite sure if she was amused. “I have good news, and bad news. Good news, I’m not one of them. Bad news, I’m, uh, working on the mind control chips…?”

Dennis frowned. “Before I ask, can Taylor eavesdrop here?” He sat on a chair next to Paige. It was almost a high stool, but it had a moulded low back.

“She _could_ , but not without me knowing.” Paige looked smug. “I made sure of that.”

“That’s good. So… you said you work on mind control?” He tried to make his voice casual. He didn’t want to _attack_ her. He looked at the mess of tools and parts on Paige’s table. “Is that what you’re doing right now?”

“I’m putting the finishing touches on a comms amp unit,” she said proudly. “Mine are at least an order of magnitude stronger than the normal ones, for less power.”

“Your specialty?”

“Part of it.”

“The other part...?”

She let her gaze drop. “I can hijack comms and influence people’s emotions, through the sound,” she admitted.

“That sucks,” Dennis said. “Unless you _wanted_ to mind control people?”

“I was exiled for it.”

“Ah.” Dennis rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly.

The silence stretched.

“I never meant to hurt anyone,” Paige blurted.

“No?”

“Never. It was a mistake.”

“What happened?”

She told Dennis about the pirates who had attacked her comms relays, and how she’d accidentally made them kill each other. Her tone started defensive, but by the end, she was _angry_.

“—they wanted to send me to the _Birdcage_ for that. I was _this_ fucking close to being locked away forever.”

“I’m sorry,” Dennis said. “I’m… not a fan of mind control. But even I don’t think you deserved that. It sounded like a clear case of self defense.”

“R-right.” Paige faltered, then blushed. “I’m sorry for dumping that on you.”

“It’s okay.” Dennis got up and stretched. “Mind if I look around? It’s been days since I’ve been anywhere that’s not my room or the obs deck, basically.”

“Just don’t break anything.” She started picking apart a breadboard. “Probably don’t touch the gloveboxes either.”

“What’s in them?”

“Implants. Most of the process is automatic, but they usually need a little tweaking. And Taylor’s bad at it. Robots can’t calibrate the implants, and she gets bored doing them herself.” She snorted. “Considering how many specialties went into making them… she’s more of an end-user these days, really. The original design...” She trailed off. She probably realized she was about to go on a rant about the technology that Dennis wouldn’t be able to understand. It happened a lot to Captains.

He inspected the meticulously labelled component cabinets. “So… why do you do it?”

“Mind control?” He could hear the frown in her voice. “I don’t know, really.”

“What?” He glanced at her, but she wasn’t facing his way. “You’re not being forced to do it, are you?”

“No, I could probably leave if I really wanted to.”

“Then?”

“I don’t _endorse_ mind control. If I can avoid it.”

“You’re working on it, and that means you’re still responsible for it.” Dennis raised an eyebrow at a drawer labeled _sapphire glass, 2x2cm_. “Whether you do it yourself, or let someone else use the things you made. A friend of mine got chipped. I’m not happy about it. Not one damn bit.”

“I know I’m responsible.” She sighed. “I don’t like it. But the Endbringers… they’re bigger than all of us. They really are. Have you ever…?”

Dennis shuddered. “Yes. I still have nightmares.”

“Sorry. She offered me a choice, you know. Work for her, or forget it ever happened and keep on doing what I’ve been doing.”

Dennis put a hand on his chest, feeling it pounding. “What _were_ you doing?”

“I was helping Dragon scout J-space. Er, unexplored space. Jargon, sorry.”

“ _The_ Dragon?” Dennis turned to look at Paige.

“Yeah.” She smiled. “She’s really nice. I think she’s the nicest person I ever met. I was flying an Astero, but then one of Taylor’s minions attacked me.” Paige’s smile faded. “ _That_ part, I can’t forgive. I thought I actually would die. I’m not much of a fighter, you know.”

“What happened? And how long ago was this?”

“A couple months? She sent this pirate hunter after me, someone named Hess, and she… she _toyed_ with me. Said she would destroy my ship, but maybe let me go if I fought back. But actually she just neuted me out, and put a chip in my head. Taylor called to offer me the job once I was back on my own ship.”

Dennis shuddered. He’d known she had been chipped, but hearing it in person... “Was it really an _offer_ , if you had her mind control implants in your head? Wouldn’t you just say yes to everything?”

“I thought that, too, at first, but… there’s levels to the implants. She set it at the minimum level for the offer, and asks me before turning it up for something.”

“That’s creepy as hell. Mind control first and ask questions later. At least she took it out.” Dennis shook his head, walking to the other side of the room, where the gloveboxes were. He crouched. There were delicate-looking nanochips inside, smaller than his pinky nail and with exposed circuitry. The glovebox had a digital magnifier, and there was also a robotic manipulator arm inside. It wasn’t really his area of expertise, though, so he didn’t understand what it was supposed to do.

“I mean. It’s definitely a little creepy. But… it helps her trust people, I think. Wonder if she got burned badly, before.” He heard a series of _snap_ s, probably her using the mini spot welder. “And I guess this is the kind of plan that warrants paranoia. I made her promise to deactivate all of the implants, if she ever destroys all the Endbringers.”

“How can you trust her to keep that promise?” Dennis felt her eyes on him. He looked back, and she was raising an eyebrow incredulously. “Er, right.” He paused. “I _still_ don’t get how you were so okay with being chipped. How did it _feel_?”

“Like nothing at all,” Paige said. “Like I blinked, and then an hour had passed. It was one of the prototype security features, blanket memory suppression. I’m the one that implemented the subtler targeted suppression mode. It’s a lot less disruptive. I worked on the part where you’re more willing to agree with someone who’s been authorized to give orders, too. The full control mode… It was so _crude_.“ She made a face. “I had to help—I knew I could make the implants nicer. So if she’s going to chip people anyways, I can help them be better off. And, I felt like if I said no, and then her plan didn’t work out, it’d weigh down on me for the rest of my life. That I could’ve helped save humanity, but didn’t.”

Responsibility for what she _hadn’t_ done. He could empathize with that. But… “Would it really count as _helping_ , though? Mind control is mind control, no matter how _nice_ it is to the victim. There’s a good reason the Protectorate punishes mind control so harshly.” Paige winced. Dennis hadn’t meant to remind her of her trial. “It’s about humanity. Your mind is supposed to be your own, not affected by someone else. It’s what makes you, _you_. And her plan might not work as well as she hopes. What then? All those people, enslaved for nothing.”

“It really is about humanity,” Paige said. “You know how scary the Endbringers are. We can’t go on like this. With one or two planets a month gone, we’ll run out soon.” Paige turned over a microprocessor in her hands. “But we also can’t give it our all when we fight the Endbringers, because the Protectorate has to keep the Imperial Union out of their space, and fight off all the warlords, protect their systems from pirates…”

Dennis was familiar with this. It often appeared in introductory strategy textbooks—why the Protectorate couldn’t just go to war with the Imperial Union, or stamp out the warlords once and for all. Too much space to cover, and the Imperial Union constantly tested their borders, sending skirmishing parties at any sign of weakness.

“So, yeah,” Paige finished lamely.

“Only if the pirates could stop being pirates, and the warlords stop being warlords.” Dennis scowled. “It _almost_ sounds reasonable.”

Paige had a wry grin on her face. “I know, right? But even if the plan doesn’t work, at least we made a good effort at it. We tried, and maybe that’ll count for something.”

“I... wish I could say people could work together _without_ it. But they haven’t really, so far.”

“Maybe someone could invent a new weapon that could beat an Endbringer.” Paige shrugged. “One of those Titan things? But until then, I’m going to keep on doing this, and hope it’s all worth it in the end. I really hope it is.”

Dennis was silent for a moment. “So… even if you don’t _like_ mind control, you think it’s worth it in the end.”

“Pretty much.”

“You really agree with Taylor a lot, don’t you?” Dennis sat back down.

Paige coughed. “I–I guess I do,” she said.

“Mind if I stay here? I _really_ don’t want to go back to my room.”

“Sure. I know small stuff isn’t your specialty, but you can try to make something if you want. It’ll be fun.” She grinned. “Like playing with blocks. You can build a castle.”

“I’m not _that_ bad at electronics,” Dennis protested.

Paige laughed. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Maaaybe I’ll stick to a pad. Do you have a spare?”

She gave him one, pulling it out of a charging port under the workbenches

He settled in to read the olds, trading jokes with Paige every once in a while.

He may have been inside a mind-control lab, deep in the bowels of a warlord’s ship… but he felt comfortable. At ease. He was almost sad when the bot eventually came to take him back to his cabin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BeaconHill receives, as always, heartfelt thanks for putting up with me bothering them 24/7 and making my unrefined lump of coal into something resembling proper writing, as well as a prototype mind control implant. Not _in_ her, mind you. Thank you tearlessNevermore and profHoyden for encouraging me to keep writing instead of flopping, as well as looking over stuff for impressions.


	7. Surface Damage

Karen Park poked her head into Ben’s room. “Hey, are you coming for the fight? Dana is.”

He was packing. A duffel bag was on his bed, and a suitcase was open on the floor. “They told us we probably shouldn’t,” he said.

He slid his closet closed. His room was just like all the other rooms at the Lü Zhong Flight Academy—just large enough to have a closet, a bed, and a desk. Ben crouched and shoved some stuff into his suitcase. He mumbled something that Karen couldn’t quite catch.

“What did you say?’

“I said, you’re going to _die_ if you go out there, Karen.” He looked uncharacteristically serious when he raised his head to look at her. “It’s the _Behemoth_. You can’t stop it.”

“I damn well have to try,” she snapped back. She paused, a little embarrassed, then continued in a softer tone. “I came here because I wanted to _help_. I’m not cut out for the Navy, but if I could do anything…”

Ben shook his head. “It won’t help.”

“Wow, way to be a downer,” Karen said, trying to smile.

“Sorry.”

She stood there awkwardly for a moment, leaning against the door frame.

“Think we could see each other again? Y’know, if the Academy survives.”

“Maybe.” Ben sighed. “If it doesn’t, I think this would be the last time.”

He was from the Imperial Union. Outside of special cases like the Lü Zhong Academy, she knew there really wasn’t a way to get permission to enter their space, or for a Union citizen to come to Protectorate space. Without defecting, anyways. “Damn,” she said, keeping her voice light. “That’s some heavy shit.”

Ben shrugged. “Something like that.”

Karen watched him continue packing. “I’ll see you again, I hope,” she said.

“See you.”

She stepped out of his room.

* * *

Karen walked into the the Lü Zhong Academy’s auditorium. Its rows and rows of seats, warm wood panelling and lattice of mysterious machines on the roof were all very familiar. The reason she actually _liked_ this auditorium was because its right and left walls were large panels of glassteel. The left panel showed off a view of the planet Zavre IV. It was a rough, basalt-colored planet, with hundreds of active volcanos spewing magma, hot gases and dust into what passed for its atmosphere. The glow of lava on the night side was pretty, but she wouldn’t want to live there. It was probably lethal.

The Academy was small for a flight school, with only one thousand students. And maybe one quarter of those students were here right now. The auditorium never had looked so empty. Karen walked through the gently sloping aisle for the row Dana had said she was in. She found her and plopped down next to her.

“They should just shut up,” Dana muttered without preamble. “Loud as fuck.”

“Yeah,” Karen said simply. She touched her hand to Dana’s.

Dana groaned and sank deeper into her chair.

Karen tried to distract her. “Did you see the jump freighter jump in?”

“No,” Dana said shortly.

“I think it’s still moored over there… Yeah, there.” Karen pointed, and Dana looked.

“Huh. It’s big.”

“Two point three kilometers long,” Karen said. “Isn’t it cool?”

Out the right window, the side that didn’t show a view of the planet, the Ark-class jump freighter _Came Here For A Good Time_ gleamed in the sunlight. It had to be at least ten kilometers away, but Karen could still make it out. The ship was shaped like an elongated beetle, with a smooth, round upper surface painted a rich red, along with gold-painted centerline and trim. It was a freighter, which meant cavernous cargo bays, but more importantly it had a jump drive.

“I can barely see it,” Dana said. She was staring out the window, too, and her tone wasn’t that annoyed.

“Please,” Karen said. “I know you’re just saying that because you want to be grumpy.”

“Hell yes I’m grumpy.”

The glowing trails of smaller industrial ships ferrying students, personnel and cargo to the loading depot next to the jump freighter were easily visible against the dim stars. The Lü Zhong Academy didn’t have a large enough hangar to accommodate a freighter, so they had set up a special, miniature station that was essentially a glorified airlock for loading and unloading supply freighters. That said, the depot was _miniature_ only in comparison to the Academy itself. It was perfectly capable of handling standard-sized shipping containers, which was required since many of the cruisers the Academy used for training had to be shipped out here in the first place, disassembled and packed in containers.

“I said bye to Ben earlier,” Karen said.

“So he’s not coming?”

“No. He thinks it’s basically suicide.”

Dana made the barest effort at a shrug. “It kinda is. Didn’t you read the announcement? One out of two non-Captain ships cruiser and smaller are lost every fight against Behemoth.”

“It’s still the right thing to do.”

“Yeah.” Dana said that matter-of-factly. Karen grinned at her.

The announcement had been made forty eight hours ago. _Behemoth_ had been detected by D-scan stations in neighboring system Mirke, three light years away. The Protectorate station there had sent out interceptors armed with enhanced D-scanning modules to verify the automaton’s heading and velocity; they’d decided _Behemoth_ was headed towards Zavre with reasonable confidence. The Protectorate starting mustering all the ships and Captains that could make it to Zavre in time, and had informed the Imperial Union as per protocol. Surprising everyone, the Union had replied.

The auditorium was quiet, now. Dana straightened up in her seat, looking visibly relieved.

The two presidents of the Academy were standing on the stage. President André Myers, an old, ex-something from the Protectorate navy, and President Guangfu Yu, a sharp-looking mid-age man from the Imperial Union’s own navy. André was at the podium. The large hologram screens projected near the middle of the room showed a closer image of the President.

“Greetings, those of you with more bravado than brains,” he said, tone biting. “If you had carefully read the announcement sent out two days ago, I’m sure you would’ve realized how futile a non-Captain going against _Behemoth_ is. You’re still here, which I take to mean you haven’t. The jump freighter _Came Here For A Good Time_ ”—he sneered contemptuously—”will be leaving the system in fifteen minutes. I suggest you take a shuttle over right now if you haven’t yet. Go on. Nobody will blame you.”

The other students stirred, but no-one got up. André Myers sighed sharply. He leaned forward, gripping the podium. “As many of you know, I have served in the Protectorate navy for longer than any of you have been alive. I have participated in countless Endbringer fights, including at least ten encounters with the _Behemoth_. I have flown alongside _Tower of Alexandria_. I have watched stars much like Zavre Prime go nova when we failed to chase _Leviathan_ off in time. I have heard the _Simurgh_ ’s song. I have witnessed comrades be executed in the field, when their shields failed and their minds were twisted by the automaton.

“So I am uniquely qualified to say this: none of you are ready. You aren’t going to make one damn difference in this fight. You will go out there and die. You might be blown apart by a point defense missile, or cooked alive by _Behemoth_ ’s radiant heat, or be destroyed by friendly fire. There’s a helluva lot of firepower going to be flying around out there. Typical non-Captain fatalities against the _Behemoth_ are one in two deaths. In reality, I predict that nine out of ten here will die today. Look around. Everyone in your row is going to be dead, and maybe even you too.”

The man straightened, and slowly swept his gaze from left to right.

“You’re all too young for this fight, and more importantly you don’t have the right skillset to help. So go. Leave. Enlist in the Navy, or the Imperial Union’s navy if you’re a Union citizen. That’s how you help. Not by throwing your lives into the grinder, here and now. Let the Yangban, the Navy, the Captains engage the _Behemoth_. I cannot order any of you to do anything, but I sincerely _urge_ you to leave. This is your last chance.”

There was a stirring in the auditorium now that the president had stopped speaking, the noise of dozens of people talking quietly to their neighbors adding up. “I think that’s the most emotional I’ve ever seen President Myers,” Karen said.

Dana snorted. “Dramatic as hell.”

Some people did get up and hurry out of the auditorium. But not that many.

At length, André Myers continued. “Fine. So you’re going to stay. This is the only briefing you’ll be getting, so listen well. Maybe you’ll manage to live. President Yu will continue.” He nodded towards the other president and stiffly walked out off the stage.

Yu stepped up to the podium. Karen had always thought his voice was smooth and reassuring, and today was no different. Also, he had an interesting Union accent.

“Students,” he started. “You will each be supplied a Crow-class interceptor. Each Crow will be fitted for survivability. You will not have weapons, because frigate weapons are not effective against the _Behemoth_. Your objective is simple. One, do not approach within twenty kilometers of _Behemoth_. The Endbringer will overload your life support systems with its heat, and you will die. Two, tackle the _Behemoth_ and keep it tackled. Endbringers travel sub-light by using their warp cores. This means that any form of tackle, point _or_ scram, will slow the _Behemoth_ ’s approach to the station. You will have a warp disruptor on your ship. The enemy will land on the edge of the system. Delaying its approach means more time for the defenders to chase it off.

“You must keep your micro warp drives active at all times. _Behemoth_ is primarily armed with missiles. You all know the three S’s of missile damage. Sig radius, ship speed, and ship velocity. Keep the first one down and the last two up and you will be fine.”

Smaller sig radiuses meant less damage from an explosion. High ship speed meant a ship could fly out of an explosion as it was happening. And high ship velocity meant the missiles might never even catch you. Karen felt her pulse quicken. The coming fight felt realer to her.

“Interceptors align quickly. If the _Behemoth_ locks you, warp out _immediately._ You will not know if _Behemoth_ is firing light missiles or torpedoes at you until you are hit, and light missiles will ruin your fragile ships’ day. If you still wish to fight after that, all you need to do is warp back in. Otherwise, activate your emergency beacon and wait for someone to pick you up. Any questions?”

A man towards the front raised his hand. “Why interceptors? Why not cruisers?”

“To put it bluntly? More warm bodies on the field. A cruiser will take at least ten people per ship. Three hundred interceptors will do much more to slow down _Behemoth_ than thirty non-Captain cruisers. Though cruisers may be less fragile, _Behemoth_ will also be better able to apply missile damage to a cruiser. Tactically, interceptors are a much better option.”

Someone else started asking another question. Karen turned to Dana again. “You’re cruiser-track, right? Are you going to be okay flying a ceptor?”

Dana looked thoughtful for a moment, before her usual scowl returned. “I’m not as good as you, but I can manage, I think.”

Karen nodded. She smiled at Dana, then leaned over to give her a hug. Awkwardly, since the armrests were in the way. Dana leaned in just a little, which meant a lot to Karen. Dana didn’t usually like hugs. She thought of saying something, but decided better. It was comforting.

A bright flash caught her eye. Karen looked towards the right.

There was a red vortex surrounding the _Came Here For A Good Time_ , white in the center, and little electricity trails were crawling along its hull. They weren’t little, she reminded herself. They were probably thicker than a person, if she could see them from here. The _Good Time_ ’s shape twisted in a way that hurt her eyes, then disappeared in a streak of light that moved up, but… upper? Not the left-right axis, or the top-bottom axis, or the close-far axis. Just… _up_. It hurt her head to try and make sense of it, so Karen pushed it out of her mind. Ben was gone, now. Safe.

“I think that’s our cue,” Dana said. “Time to go.”

Everyone was standing up. A number of students were holding signs with last name ranges on them. Dana’s last name was Knight, and Karen’s was Park, so they wouldn’t be in the same group.

“I’ll see you.” Karen hugged her again.

Dana smiled a little. “Yeah,” she said. Then she turned away.

* * *

Karen didn’t know why the Academy station had fighter tubes. Had they expected attacks from, like, pirates? It wasn’t like there was anything _to_ rob. Either way, she was currently sitting in a Crow-class interceptor in Fighter Tube Five. The Crow-class interceptor looked like a typical suborbital plane, what with its somber blue-grey panels, and wing-shaped structures that probably didn’t provide lift. Hers was named _LZA Crow 5-4_. She would've renamed it to something with more character if she _could_ have.

Each fighter tube fit up to ten ceptors. Each Crow’s wings were locked into ridges along the walls of the tube, and when it was time all ten interceptors would be magnetically flung out of the station, kinda like they were really big railgun projectiles. Supposedly the system originated from carriers, where dumping fifty fighters out of the hangars in an instant was the difference between victory and defeat. And once they already had a standard system for it, why not give stations a tube or five?

The cockpit of her Crow was rather cramped. Smaller than her own dorm room. It was all the way at the nose of the ship. As typical for interceptors, the cockpit also doubled as the escape pod—it would be ejected from the rest of the ship in emergencies. There was a canopy window, too, which made the cockpit feel less claustrophobic.

The single chair took up most of the floor space, with only a small amount of room to squeeze out of to head towards the rest of the ship. Not that there was much there. A bunk that was more like a padded shelf, a closet for rations, a bathroom—one of those low-water designs that vented into space—the electronics cabinet and the sweltering-hot reactor room. The space saved on things like _hallways_ and _actual rooms_ was taken up by oversized sublight engines and interceptor systems.

Karen went down the pre-flight checklist. Levers had to be flipped, modes set, supplies loaded and warp core lit. In fact, the second item on the checklist was:

_Warp core indicator GREEN._

Many of these interceptors had been in storage for a while; it would be catastrophic to deploy without an active warp core. The tiny indicator light at the top left of the instrument panel, labeled _CORE_ , was indeed green. She snorted when she saw the section labelled _Weapons module checks_. There weren’t any to do.

_Reactor sustained output >98%_

The checklist was tedious, but it also helped her focus, have something to do instead of anxiously chewing on her fingernails while waiting for _Behemoth_ to appear at the edge of Zavre’s gravity well. And it helped her familiarize herself with this model of interceptor—she’d trained on Stiletto-class interceptors, which had all the same functions but in different places.

_Shield charged >95%._

_Behemoth_ really was coming. Karen would be out there, and there would be hundreds of ships, and Captains, and Dana would be there too. She would be lying to herself if she said she didn’t have second thoughts.

_Check escape pod self diagnostics ALL CLEAR._

But she owed it to herself to follow through. She would be fine. She would survive. Everything would be fine. Karen took a deep breath to steady herself. She strapped herself into the seat with the five-point harness, and stowed the checklist pad in its slot. She turned on her tactical hologram, and gripped the yoke experimentally. It fit into her grasp easily.

The red strip-light on the sides of the tube turned yellow. She felt a thrill, not unlike that just as a rollercoaster reached the top of a hill. She imagined the roar of sub-light engines idling.

The yellow light started blinking. Then it turned green. In a blink of an eye Karen had been flung into space. Her radio crackled to life. The sound went through the headset she was wearing. The man speaking had that cool self-assuredness all Mission Control seemed to have.

_“Wing Echo Five, Home. Align to transmitted coordinates and warp in ten, on my mark.”_

Karen counted along under her breath.

“ _Mark_.”

A shared warp bubble between all nine of her wingmates snapped into place, and Zavre IV dropped away. The tunnel stretched into infinity.

 

The first thing Karen saw when they dropped out of warp was the _Behemoth_. Karen checked the mini tac map behind the yoke. The red double-arrowhead icon of the Endbringer was annotated with the distance. ‘53km.’ It didn’t look like it was that far away out the canopy. About as big as her fist, and brighter than the sun of Zavre was, this far out . Too bright to look at closely. She knew that the _Behemoth_ was a roughly eight kilometer long sphere, mostly hollow, with rugged, irregularly-shaped plates loosely floating around a plasma core. The core was the source of all the light and the heat. And if the fact that the Endbringer was essentially a small, artificial star wasn’t enough, it _also_ bristled with missile emplacements, varying from point defense missiles, to heavy assault missiles, torpedoes, and cruise missiles. It was right _there_.

Karen’s breath was coming in quick gasps, but instinct drilled into her over and over again kept her moving. She eased the power lever forward with her right hand and pressed the round button with the micro warp drive icon on it with her left. Keep moving, she knew. The tactical map showed a small arrow coming out of the center dot that was herself, showing her velocity. The speed indicator, an old-fashioned seven segment display, shot from 0 to just shy of 4500 m/s in under five seconds. As usual, she felt no sense of motion, no pressing back into her seat, no scenery whizzing by, no sound of wind whistling around the interceptor. The inertial stabilizers prevented her from being squished into goo from the sudden acceleration. Over 50 _g_ s but hardly a whisper. Being pressed into her seat would’ve been a welcome distraction.

Karen angled her ship perpendicular to the Endbringer. She glanced at her tactical map again to try and take in the situation. There was a dizzying array of icons scattered across the map. The Protectorate’s icons, colored blue, were spreading out towards the right side of the map. There were hundreds of cruisers, she could see, and battleships, and some of the imposing fat-triangle-with-a-tail for dreadnoughts, but also little blue triangles zipping between all the bigger ships. She felt a kinship with them. They were all little ships that could barely tickle the _Behemoth_ , trying to do what they could to stop it. Like ants trying to take down Goliath.

The Yangban’s ships were the light blue color of temporary allies, and were bunched up in a strict formation, like one of those buckyballs in her high school science books so many years ago. They were holding themselves apart from those of the Imperial Navy, which instead imitated the Protectorate’s formation, the smaller ships spreading out like a screen.

If she didn’t know better, Karen would’ve thought they were about to fight each other.

With a start, Karen realized that she’d been staring at the map too long. She was drifting in the wrong direction. Karen pulled on the yoke and started spiraling towards the _Behemoth_. This, too, was part of her interceptor pilot training. Never fly directly at your target, because even battleship guns can hit a stationary target. It was a little silly to apply that principle to the gigantic, missile-spewing Endbringer, but there also wasn’t much reason not to.

Thirty kilometers now, at the edge of her point range. Karen glanced at the target list, a text-only screen built into the yoke, and brought up the list of enemy ships, a list that was one long at the moment. Her thumb hovered over the bright red _Target_ button on one of the yoke’s handles. Once she started tackling the _Behemoth_ , she would be fair game to whatever Endbringer-algorithm that decided its targets. No going back. She pressed the button, and pushed on her yoke to dive downwards.

(Not that there was a _down_ in space.)

The real reason that she had been on the interceptor track while Dana had been on the cruiser one, Karen thought, was because she _sucked_ at situational awareness. Dana would’ve been able to pull some sense out of the tactical map, and cruiser captains needed that skill, while Karen tended to tunnel vision on her target and often got tagged by some other ship in their practical exercises. She just couldn’t keep track of her ship’s state, talk to her officers at their stations, _and_ pay attention the battlefield all at once.

Even now, all she knew was which way her ship was going, and how far away the _Behemoth_ was, and oh _shit_ she forgot to actually start pointing it. Karen pressed the right button. The familiar, shrill beep told her the warp disruptor module was active. She looked up, again. It was so bright, so _big_ , terrifying—she glanced down holy _fuck_ she was only twenty one kilometers away, she needed to pull away. Distracted _again_. Karen spun her interceptor around and and pulled on the yoke, relying on her tactical map to keep track of which way the Endbringer was.

Was it just her imagination, or was the cockpit warmer than before?

Flashes of light made the shadows on her cockpit instruments flicker. Karen looked up again, despite herself. She saw a veritable meteor storm of pinpricks, barely-visible dots with tails flying across space. _Behemoth_ ’s missiles, probably. She saw a heavy barrage of heavy duty laser fire, each beam probably able to destroy her ship into small pieces with a glancing hit. They were bright blue. She checked her map, spun the interceptor some, and craned her neck trying to spot the source. It was an anvil-shaped ship, painted a uniform dark grey and about as large as her pinky nail. It had to be huge, of course, since it was so far away. The dreadnought that was famous across the galaxy. She didn’t have to look at her map to know its name. _Tower of Alexandria_. The ship that was literally indestructible. An example of the finest of humankind.

The buoyant feeling in her chest was _probably_ hope. Either that, or her inertial stabilizers were acting up. Karen nervously giggled and pulled on her yoke a little more, to stay in the sweet spot between instant, fiery death and literally contributing nothing to the fight. Ten kilometers of give. She was _really_ glad she didn’t have weapons to pay attention to on top of all of this.

How long had it been? Check the clock… just over a minute. Karen nudged her interceptor a little closer to _Behemoth_. As terrifying as it was to be so close, how she felt like she was drawn taut, and how all the adrenaline made it feel like her body wasn’t her own… she couldn’t deny that it was a little exciting. She was probably one of the fastest things on the battlefield, and she was using all that speed to fly in circles around a fucking _Endbringer_. If she made it out— _when_ , she firmly told herself—what a tale will it be.

A shrill beep startled her. Karen scanned her instruments. The ring-shaped red LED meant…

An icy chill ran through her.

_Target locked_.

She had to go faster. Three S’s, speed and sig radius and something she couldn’t for the life of her remember and it _wasn’t fucking important_. Karen stabbed the tiny square button under the round one of the micro warp drive. Applying heat. The speed indicator went even higher, ticking upwards way too slowly. She shoved her yoke as hard as she could, sending her interceptor in a spiraling dive _away_ from the _Behemoth_. Align, she needed to align—a direction that _wasn’t_ towards the Endbringer. She levelled out from the spiral…

The entire ship shook, and she heard a _boom_. She glanced at her quick-status, three nested arcs, normally white. The outermost arc was half-red, now. Half her shield gone. And the Crow was shield-tanked, so she would be able to take two more hits at best.

Another boom, and only a sliver of shield was left. The computer belatedly beeped three times.

_Please_ , Karen prayed. She wasn’t religious. Who was she praying to? Her eyes were fixed on the speed indicator, the numbers ticking up way too slowly.

_Boom_.

Three alarms rung at once.

Her ship’s speed snapped to 0, then wildly zoomed up, settling on 16 AU/s. Did she make it?

Karen’s heart sunk as remembered the alarms. One was the low armor one, and the other was the low hull alert. Her Crow’s first and second rings were entirely red, and the third one was half red. Hull damage meant damaged systems. Hell, the ship might shake the wrong way, and if the inertial stabilizers were damaged the whole thing would fall to pieces. She scanned the systems lights. Many of them were blinking yellow or red. Dammit. And the inertial stabilizer light was red, which could mean anything from ‘hanging on by a thread’ to ‘still good for non-combat purposes.’ If this was a bigger ship, maybe she could have tried to fix it. Somehow. But the systems on an interceptor were only accessible for repair externally. There was nowhere near enough space to allow for internal access hatches on interceptors.

Her hands shook. She needed to exit warp sometime. But she might _die_ , when the normal laws of physics reasserted themselves on her ship. She had to do it, but she wanted to delay the inevitable. Karen looked at her instruments forlornly. She would need an emergency pickup. She flicked open a small glass cover on the side of the cockpit. The distress beacon. She twisted the dial from ARMED to ACTIVE.

Then she braced herself, and tugged the _warp abort_ lever.

Karen was tossed into the side of her seat. Before she could recover, she was thrown against the other side, and the back, and again… The harness kept her from flying across the cockpit, at least. It was disorienting. The stabilizers were obviously not working very well, because this was the worst warp shake she’d ever felt. Something was beeping but she wasn’t able to check _what_. Was this how she died? Karen grit her teeth. The shake should be over soon. She felt so heavy.

She was thrown forward, hard.

Then there was nothing.

* * *

Karen almost didn’t want to wake up. Every time she breathed, she felt pain. When she shifted, something dug into her. More pain. Something was beeping. She probably should check that. She opened her eyes. Lights were blinking on her instrument panel, but she couldn’t focus on them well enough. _Fuck_. She took a mental inventory of _where_ hurt. Her neck ached, she was dizzy, her torso felt like it was on fire…

She looked down, ignoring the stab of pain she felt from her neck. Her fatigues were sticking to her. They were damp with blood where the straps had dug into her. Karen cursed again. At least she wasn’t dead. She leaned her head back.

What was the time? She would’ve been surprised if she was in the fight for longer than five minutes, and out for more than one. Her inertial stabilizers were busted, meaning she couldn’t really fly back—if the acceleration didn’t kill her, exiting warp would. She was a sitting duck, unable to warp out and too far from anyone to matter. All she could do was wait for someone to spot her emergency beacon. Her tac-map was entirely empty, without even a planet on it. She was stranded somewhere in intersystem space.  
Karen wanted to fight more. She needed to help. _Behemoth_ was something so much bigger than them all and every bit surely helped.

But she also knew how insignificant what she had done was. She’d slowed it down a tiny bit, for less than five minutes, then had come _this_ close to dying. Was that really worth her life? She couldn’t deny that she was relieved her part in this fight was over. She’d tried her best.

Karen sat there for a while, feeling her wounds pulse in time with her heartbeat, looking up, out at the stars. What if her emergency beacon wasn’t working? What if one of the red light systems on her panel was comms? Would she die here? The Crow was already about as spacious as a coffin, anyways. Karen started laughing, but quickly stopped. It hurt too much. She looked at the panel again. Nope, eyes still not working well.

She probably should go drink some water, what with all the fluid loss, but she couldn’t really muster the will to. If anything, the Crow’s seat was comfortable. Snug, even. She wondered how Dana was doing.

Time passed, her thoughts only accompanied by the incessantly beeping alarms that she couldn’t silence.

_“Lima-zulu-alpha Crow five tac four, are you there?”_

Karen jumped, and hissed in pain. She looked at her tac-map—she _thought_ she saw white icons, tinged with yellow. She squinted. Yes, that was definitely a yellow exclamation point on the corner. Suspects—pirates?

_“Lima-zulu-alpha Crow five tac four, do you hear me?”_

It was a woman talking. She sounded impatient, rushing through her ship’s name faster than Karen had been taught. She hesitated, then reached out and pressed the transmit button on the left handle of the yoke.

“This is five tac four,” Karen said cautiously.

_“Great, we were starting to think you weren’t alive in there.”_

“Who are you?”

_“We’re the cavalry, that’s who_. _”_ The woman paused. _“But this is the_ Monarch _, and I’m Lisa. Nice to meet you.”_

Karen had to ask. “Are you pirates?”

_“Technically, yes. We’re actually being all altruistic here, though, so please don’t try anything rash. From what I can see, you’re about as likely to turn yourself into mush as you are to get away.”_

Karen grimaced. Even though the woman had a point, she wasn’t sure if she _should_ trust them. Not that she had a choice, she reminded herself. “Okay,” she said. “I won’t.”

_“You’re missing both of your maneuver engines, two out of four main engines, your armor’s shot and there’s a gaping hole in your right wing. I think it’s safe to say the ship’s a write-off. Are you injured?”_

“I’m bleeding, I have a concussion, and my inertial stabilizers are dead, too. Actually, I got the former from the latter.”

_“Nice. Lucky you’re still alive. Well—”_

A second voice cut in. _“Man, you’re one hell of a survivor. How’d you not get squished?”_

“Sheer force of will?” Karen tried to make her voice light.

_“Good shit.”_

_“_ The Space Kraken _, please keep radio discipline,”_ Lisa said.

_“You’re not my real mom_ , _I don’t have to lis—_ ”

“What should I do?” Karen was a _little_ impatient to get some treatment.

_“Eject and we’ll pick you up and get you some first aid. Uh, go for a soft eject.”_

“Roger that.”

Karen reached over to the side of her seat and opened a panel there. She turned the handle ninety degrees before pulling it. The cockpit sealed and separated from the rest of the hull, and half her instrument panel went dark. A soft eject simply cut off the escape pod, while a hard eject used the cockpit’s solid fuel rockets to shove it out of the way. Obviously, with herself injured and the inertial stabilizers dead, she wasn’t going to enjoy a hard eject.

_“We’ve got you,"_ Lisa sent.

Karen felt a gentle tug. Tractor beam. She tried to relax, to look on the bright side. She wasn’t dead. If Dana made it out too, she would see her again.

She would fly another day.

* * *

_Postscript._

**Battle of Zavre — _Behemoth_** (2315.09.18)

**Participants** : Imperial Union Navy, Yangban, Protectorate Navy, independent forces (including Academy militia, freelancers, pirates, warlords) **vs** _Behemoth_.

**Objective** : See file [Lü Zhong Academy].

**Summary** : _Behemoth_ retreats before reaching the station, marking this as one of the few total victories (ie, the objective was not damaged or ceded) against an Endbringer. Combined abridged losses are as follows.

(Fleet Power system used, numbers assigned to ships scaling by cost and crew complement)

**Total defense force** : 15966 FP. 4742 FP lost.

**Note** : Exceptionally high number of interceptor losses. Most of these losses were volunteers from the Lü Zhong Academy—210/300, or 70% of total losses. Suspected that the _Behemoth_ preferentially targeted interceptors from the Academy.

See file [Battle of Zavre — _Behemoth_ battle report] for full details.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to BeaconHill and profHoyden for betaing, and tearlessNevermore for telling me to not be silly about what I think about my writing. BeaconHill gets Karen’s rations that she never got around to eating.


	8. Teatime with Jane 5

**_2318.06.10 — Today’s News At A Glance_ **

_ Leviathan attacks Dobrisa—colony lost to “gargantuan solar flares”; Protectorate station 75% hull—“battered but intact” _  
“It got what it came for,” said an anonymous Navy officer. “The atmosphere’s entirely gone. [Dobrisa V]’s a write-off.” 

_ Beam laser focal crystal prices soar in wake of Dobrisa loss; authorities encourage using Aurora or microwave _  
Dobrisa was one of the primary producers of radio-wavelength focal crystals for beam weapon systems. Supply lines will be uncertain for a month or more. 

_ Slaughterhouse Nine roaming Dobrisa; system declared 1LY restricted flight zone. _  
Notorious small pirate gang S9 roaming Dobrisa aftermath; adept at slipping away from disadvantageous fights and preying on disorganized freelancers, civilians should avoid the system at all costs. 

_ Battle of Yanjia II—Navy, Union skirmish over Tech II component shipment _  
As retaliation for the 4th Muhr Blockade, the Navy conducted an excursion to Yanjia , intercepting a Union freighter carrying valuable Tech II components. Union deployed a quick-response fleet but failed to prevent Navy from extracting the objective. 

_ What flourishes in the shadows: the Dark Zone _  
A feature piece on the most notorious warlords of the Dark Zone on the spin-wards edge of Protectorate space: Lung, Kaiser, Marquis and Skitter. 

_ “Dobrisa was but a battle. We are winning the war,” says Dobrisa Commander-Governor in rousing speech to Federal Assembly _  
Commander-Governor Peyton’s speech was streamed from the surface of Dobrisa, under the shield dome of the colony’s main factory outpost. She urged the Protectorate to take this as a lesson for ‘ _Leviathan_ -proofing’ colonies... 

[Tap to load more]

* * *

Dennis threw the pad at his bed irritably.

There’d been another Endbringer attack. A _Leviathan_ attack. So of course it was all over the news. When he’d scanned the headlines, he’d found himself gripping the pad tightly, trying desperately not to think of the memories that came with them. He’d always tried to avoid… that.

God dammit.

He reflexively started taking deep breaths like— _Taylor_ had told him to, so many days ago. A week. It felt like it’d been forever since he’d seen the inside of his own ship. It was a weird, itchy feeling, to not know where exactly his ship was, and what was happening to it. He didn’t like it.

He glared at Aisha, who looked ostentatiously innocent, eyes wide. She had the pad in her hands. She’d caught it, apparently. “Why the hell are you hanging out in my room, at nine in the morning? Don’t you have your own? It’s probably bigger, even.”

“Would you believe it if I said my room is actually a cupboard?”

“No.”

“Fine. It’s cuz I’m bored and Taylor won’t play with me.” Aisha flopped onto the bed, hugging the pad. “She’s too busy preparing.”

“For what?”

“Trip to the planet. You can come too I think.”

“That’s nice.”

Aisha huffed. “Well, that’s later. I’m bored right _now_.”

Dennis crossed his arms. “Bother someone else.”

“They’re all busy.”

“ _I’m_ busy.”

“Says the prisoner.”

Dennis opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. Aisha raised her head just to smirk at him. He scowled, and sat back on his chair.

“Why were you taking out your anger on the poor pad? All it did was provide you with entertainment.”

Dennis didn’t say anything, instead looking out the window. The _Hive_ was moored on a station in orbit of Doyak III. A bog standard temperate planet, the capital of the Undersiders, insofar as warlords could have a ‘capital.’ Staging system, maybe. The sun lit up the edge of the planet’s atmosphere a bright blue. It was pretty.

“I’ll take care of you, you poor thing.” Aisha shuffled around on his bed, or something. Dennis could only hear the noise she was making. He rubbed his face, trying to tamp down on his irritation. He wasn’t _that_ mad at Aisha, but he’d taken it out on her. She was right there, though. But he still shouldn’t have.

He swivelled his chair around. She had kicked his blankets off and was on her stomach, reading something on the pad. “Get off my bed, dammit,” he said, without much heat behind the words.

“I think it might be comfier than mine…” Aisha mused. Dennis stood up. Aisha scrambled off the bed. “Fine, fine. Jerk.”

“Thank you. And the pad?”

“You’re going to just abuse it again. I can’t let it go back to you,”

Dennis rolled his eyes. “I promise not to throw it at anything.”

She eyed him. “I’ll trust you this time, _cadet_.”

He made a lazy salute and took the pad back. Aisha sat on the couch and picked up the one she had brought to the room with her from the table.

He’d discovered that, despite the _Hive_ being in relay range of a planet, his pads were still only allowed access from cached webpages from the ship’s databanks, rather than direct connections. Even the pad he’d accidentally brought to his room from the lounge. It made sense. He was a prisoner. He might try and tip off the Protectorate, bring the hammer down on the Undersiders. But...

But, he wasn’t sure if he _wanted_ to. Which made no sense. Dennis turned the pad over in his hands, thinking. He’d do it if he could, but he also wasn’t about to go actively searching for a way to do it. Because of what Paige had said yesterday. That she had to try, rather than die knowing she could’ve done more. She didn’t think it was _right_ in the moral sense, just that it was needed. That she would do it, and hope it would be worth it in the end. She was determined, but not righteous.

Not like Taylor was, anyways.

Dennis stared at the blank screen of the pad. Paige had said implants didn’t feel like anything. Would he know if he had one? How could he test it? Maybe he could make something that detects them, or... _destroys_ them. Clearly, the fact that he could think about this meant that if he had an implant, it was tuned to be very selective. And if the implant was sophisticated enough to sabotage something he made so it didn’t work… well, then he was screwed anyways.

He switched the pad on, pulled out the stylus and started sketching out some designs. Something handheld. Creating new things was always a strange experience. He’d studied electronics and circuit design, sure, but that was _after_ he’d discovered he had a talent. When he was making something, it felt like he could tap into knowledge he’d always known, but had simply forgotten existed. Like how to make a… a ship-mounted _thing_ —his knowledge never came with the words to describe them—that shot an energy projectile that isolated its target, at least for as long as the effect lasted. The people inside couldn’t affect or be affected by the outside world at all—the ship couldn’t move, weapon fire slid off them like the ship didn’t even exist, and the hull’s hatches were all sealed. Making a cruiser-sized module do that at all, let alone weaponizing it, was impossible with modern technology. Not that it stopped his module from existing, and working.

Aisha was laughing at something, but it didn’t distract him from his work. There were a lot of problems to consider. The energy thing _did_ seem to work on people, but that wouldn’t help anything… maybe if he could tune it to only work on non-organics? Of course, that would cause two or three other issues that he needed to work through.

“Whatcha doin’?”

Dennis jumped, and felt his head hit something. He heard a startled cry. He’d accidentally headbutted Aisha.

“Serves you right for startling me,” Dennis muttered. His heart was pounding from the fright. He paused. “Are you okay?”

“I’m good,” Aisha said, rubbing her nose. “I’ve seen worse. And had worse.”

“You startled me, so…”

“I’m _good_. You didn’t answer my question, though.”

Dennis looked down at the pad. Which had about ten virtual ‘pages’ of drawings and notes, with a pop-up calculator floating to the side. And an hour and a half had passed. “Well… Yesterday, Paige said I could try tinkering if I wanted, so…”

“Oh. I totally get it.” Aisha leaned over his shoulder to look. “Your handwriting fuckin’ sucks.”

“Well I’m sorry I wasn’t thinking of _other_ people when I was making notes for myself.”

“Yeah, you should be more considerate of others.”

“Hey, Aisha?”

“Shoot.”

“Do you mind taking me to the research labs again?” He wiggled the pad. “Idea popped into my head and it’s going to bug me if I don’t make it. You know.”

Aisha hopped to her feet. “Yeah, I have to work for a day on my cloak every time I lose a ceptor, and it’s annoying but it’s _more_ annoying to not make it.”

Dennis nodded. “Yeah. Maybe we can get breakfast first?”

“Sure.”

* * *

Aisha tapped her id to the push-button next to the HCI Lab IV door. It slid open immediately, unlike yesterday when Dennis had to wait.

“Huh.” Dennis looked at the door suspiciously, then followed Aisha in.

“Hey Paige,” Aisha called out.

“Eek,” Paige said. She looked down at what she was holding in her hands, some sort of component snapped into two, and flushed.

“Oh. Sorry, I forgot to tell you we were coming.” Aisha tilted her head, frowning. “Was that expensive?”

“It’s… it’s no big deal,” Paige muttered, ducking her head. She was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. A pale blue sweater made of fine thread.

“Hi,” Dennis said, frowning. It _seemed_ like it was a big deal. “Are you sure it’s okay?”

“ _Yes,_ ” she said.

“You said yesterday that I could try and make something here, right?”

“I suppose I did, didn’t I? Um, go ahead.” Paige still wasn’t looking at him, instead fiddling with a pad.

Aisha looked at Paige appraisingly, then snorted. “Can’t even remember what you said yesterday?”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said.

Dennis set his own pad on a work table near the component cabinets. He scanned the labels on the drawers. Everything he needed was here. He set to collecting the parts he needed, spreading them out on the table where he could find them easily. Working in an unfamiliar lab made it slower than it could’ve been, but generally the tools were in logical places, and the parts were ordered alphabetically.

“So, whatcha makin’?”

Dennis managed not to jump this time. “Aisha…”

“Oh. Oops.” She rolled her eyes and shrugged. “Sorry, I forgot.”

Dennis considered Aisha. How much should he tell her? Probably not that much. “It’s an experiment.”

“About?”

“Um.”

“Stop pestering him, Aisha,” Paige said, with a smile in her voice. Dennis glanced at Paige. She had straightened up and was looking his way. “He probably wants to actually concentrate on his work, right?”

“Right,” Dennis said, thankful.

Aisha grumbled and sat on a desk. She didn’t bother him any more, and Dennis was able to concentrate on his work. Even if he’d made plans to the best of his abilities, there was always something to adjust, something that just didn’t work out…

It would look like a stun gun when it was done, a blocky tool with tiny emitter prongs on the ends. The idea was that he could touch it to somebody and it would use the different conductivity of flesh and metal to target implants and other cybernetics and temporarily disable them, just like his ship-mounted module did. He couldn’t think of a way to adapt his specialty to make it destroy implants, and it was probably a bad idea anyways. There was only one problem.

“Hey, Paige? I don’t suppose you have, uh, fullerite gas suspended in an aerogel?”

“I have no idea what that is, Dennis.”

“Dammit.”

Aisha perked up. “What’s that?”

“It’s something I use for my specialty module,” Dennis said. He looked down at the scattered parts in front of him. “Comes from J-space. I don’t think I can finish this without it.”

“That’s too bad. But what _are_ you making?” Paige turned around on her chair.

“Wondered if I could freeze things that aren’t ships,” Dennis replied absently. Maybe if he could steal some from his ship module... But that would require going to his ship, which Taylor and Lisa had said was off-limits. “If I could go to my ship, I could probably take some aerogel from my module.“

“Sounds great,” Aisha said. “I was dying from boredom.”

“Well… Taylor did say I wasn’t allowed. Being a prisoner and all.”

“Fuck Taylor,” Aisha said, with more than a touch of enthusiasm. “You can go with me.”

“Aisha,” Paige said in a warning tone, glaring at her.

“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” Aisha told Paige. She smirked. “Unless you’re going to tattle?”

Paige had a complicated expression that quickly resolved into annoyance. “Of course. You’re breaking the rules.”

“Then it can’t be helped. You’re coming with us.”

“What—but—”

“Sorry, Paige,” Dennis said. He found a sample container from a drawer and hooked it onto his belt, along with a pair of screwdrivers.

“Fine.” She threw up her hands and followed him out.

Aisha took their cart on a different route to the hangar than Lisa had. Instead of turning onto the catwalk, she continued along the gently curving observation hallway and parked the cart in an alcove next to a doorway marked _Hangar 1-5CR Gangway_ which led to a fenced ledge high in the air on the hangar wall. Dennis and Paige clambered out of the cart as Aisha scanned her id chip on the controls and pressed the big grey button. Servos ground into motion, and the ledge started extending towards his ship. _Temporary Obstruction_. Whatever maintenance Taylor had been doing was over, going by the intact armor panels, though there were still thick umbilicals trailing from higher up to ports on the _Obstruction_. Dennis ran a critical eye over what he could see of the hull. He grudgingly had to admit that there weren’t any obvious defects.

“Never get to use these things,” Aisha said. “Interceptors are usually super flat, I only need like, a ladder to get in them.”

Dennis glanced at Aisha. She looked fascinated by the gangway. “I mean, you could always consider a career change.”

She snorted. “And what, go to officer school or something? Sounds lame. And besides, I’m fuckin’ _good_ at what I do.”

He shrugged. “Fair enough.”

The gangway finished extending. From this angle it looked incredibly precarious—only enough space to walk single file, with waist-height rails on each side of the dark grey path. At least it wasn’t a mesh floor. The bottom of the hangar was terribly far down. Dennis knew that cruiser gangways were usually much more stable than they looked, but he had to consciously shove down the part of him that instinctively knew the gangway would snap as soon as he set foot on it.

The floor rang loudly as the three walked across.

The interior of the ship felt subdued. The usual neutral white lighting built into the ceiling panels wasn’t on, and the dim red emergency lighting along the floor was providing most of the light. The ship was entirely quiet, none of the usual hum that always accompanied Dennis when he was commanding. Even the air smelled a little stale. He looked around uneasily.

“What’s the matter?” Paige asked.

“It just feels wrong, that there’s no, you know, vibration? Background noise.” Dennis frowned. He couldn’t help how his hairs seemed to be standing on end, and his heart rate was up. It was downright eerie. “And I swear it smells different.”

Paige hummed thoughtfully. “I guess they turned the reactor off, and the engines are obviously off too. Nothing really to make noise. Plus no life support because we’re in a station. Um, hangar.”

“That makes sense, I guess.” Dennis hesitated, then continued along the cramped hallway, searching for the right module access room. It was towards the rear, while the access hatch they had come through was in the middle.

“What’s this?” Aisha had stopped next to a doorway. The room it led to was pitch black, no lights in the ceiling, however dim, just the emergency lights along the floor.

“Oh, this room,” Paige said, peeking in.

“The observation lounge,” Dennis said. He walked a step into the room, and looked around. He could almost make out the couch. “Yeah. You can tell by how uselessly empty it is.”

“Didn’t know military cruisers had observation decks like this,” Aisha said.

“They’re pretty nice,” Paige said. “And technically it’s not a deck. Decks are supposed to be, y’know, long. Big.”

“Why’s it pitch-black?”

“There’s a switch to lower the armor over the window before going into combat. In this case, with Taylor Hebert.” Dennis had said that last sentence with only a _little_ bitterness. Probably.

“I wanna see outside.”

“There’s not enough power to run the motor,” Dennis told Aisha. “Moving eighty centimeter thick armor isn’t easy, you know.”

Aisha sniffed. “Bummer.”

Paige looked strangely wistful, though that must have been a trick of the dim light. “The view must’ve been nice, during warp.”

“Yeah,” Dennis said quietly. “I had some nice times here. Good company. Better than my cabin, too.”

“You guys are getting boring,” Aisha said. “Gonna go poke around some more.” She wandered off down the hall, and then it was just him and Paige.

“When you said nice times…” she said hesitantly.

“I mean Taylor, yes.”

“I… see.”

He’d felt so connected to her, despite her anonymity. And the tea was nice, though Dennis always thought he was a coffee person. Maybe it was the company.

Then she’d sabotaged his ship and betrayed him. Trying to smash her tea set was small compared to that, and it made him feel better at the time, but he wasn’t sure he’d do it again. At least the teapot was still intact. Taylor had reacted quickly, literally diving for it. The spilling tea must have been hot.

Maybe she’d enjoyed her time as Jane, too.

Dennis shook himself. “Should go get what we came here for.”

“Right.”

They didn’t talk much while making their way to the proper engineering room. Dennis didn’t really know which module was installed where, other than in the vague sense—weapons in rooms along the flanks, defense modules in the rear—but they were usually well-labeled. He navigated the densely packed room with a little difficulty and found the one labeled _inverted_ _stasis field projector_ , the official name for his specialty module. He just called it ‘the freeze’. It looked like a plain metal box set in a metal lattice cradle, with a bundle of cables thicker than his torso going into the side and a pipe coming out of the top. He crouched and unscrewed the front panel.

“Should’ve brought a flashlight,” he commented.

“Maybe you _should_ have told Taylor,” Paige said lightly. “Her eyes turn into flashlights.”

Dennis shuddered. “I know, and it’s really creepy.”

“I mean… it seems kinda useful. Like right now,” she said, sounding a little defensive.

“I guess.” He was using the light from the pad as a makeshift flashlight, with the brightness cranked up to the highest it would go. It was still too dim, but a lot better than the emergency lighting for machine work. He carefully unscrewed another panel and lifted it out, to set on the floor. He glanced at Paige. “Um, are you sure you don’t want to wait outside? It’s pretty cramped in here, it can’t be comfortable for you.”

“I’m good. I’ll just sit on, uh”—she squinted at the stenciled letters on the side of the module—”the warp disruptor particle generator?”

Dennis eyed the module. “I think that’ll be okay.” Paige plopped herself on top of it. He went back to work. The fullerite-aerogel was buried near the center, which in retrospect was a bad decision. What if he needed to top it up? It wasn’t strictly a consumable, but the gas slowly escaped the aerogel over time, especially with use. Something he would have to fix if he ever got serious workshop time.

The name ‘modules’ was a bit of a misnomer. It implied that you could quickly and painlessly swap out one module for an entirely different one, which wasn’t entirely the truth. Each module was actually made of multiple components, where one component was one box, and most modules needed some kind of outside connection. Warp disruptors needed particle pipes, for example, and weapon modules always had to be installed near turret hardpoints. Of course, with a little effort it _was_ possible to switch out modules. And it didn’t require a redesign of the entire ship, so there was that. That’s how they’d done it in the old days.

He opened the cylinder nestled deep in the module and opened the lid. He cut a small piece of gel off and slid it into the sample container, then quickly reassembled the module.

“All good?” Paige hopped to her feet.

“Mmhm. Let’s go find Aisha.”

She was poking around the bridge, as Dennis had expected. It had the highest count of interesting things per square meter, after all.

“I don’t get why you’d need so many people to fly this thing,” she commented as he walked in.

“What?”

She gestured at the Sensors console. “I do all this shit by myself when I’m flying.”

“And you probably miss half of it,” Dennis said. “How much situational awareness do you even have when you’re flying a ceptor? Also, a lot of interceptor systems are, to be honest, computer-controlled and pretty shitty. They just don’t have enough space to fit in the controls.”

“Taylor does all of it by herself when she’s flying.”

“Taylor’s a cyborg.”

“Yeah well your ship can’t warp out of a bubble so hah.”

Dennis snorted. “That was a weak comeback.”

“I agree,” Paige said.

“They’re ganging up on me,” Aisha whined to nobody in particular. She wandered along the consoles and came to a bulkhead. “Wait, what’s this?”

It was heavily dented, and so was the floor panel.

“That’s where Taylor stumbled into the wall. Then I punched her onto the floor.”

Aisha laughed. “And you broke your hand. I remember this story.”

“Yes,” Dennis said sheepishly. “I did. She was, uh, tougher than I expected.”

Paige smiled. “I guess it wasn’t a wise decision, huh?”

Aisha said something else, but she also rapped the wall. Three times.

The situation was hopeless. _Leviathan_ had taken notice, and shells were drumming against _Temporary Obstruction_ ’s armor, shields long gone.

_“Fuck, it’s turning this way,”_ a voice said.

_“Triumph, you’re losing traversal,”_ another voice warned. Missy?

_Leviathan_ was too fast for its size. It was bearing down on them. _Triumph_ would never escape in time.

“ _Align! Align, align, goddammit align!”_ His futile last words.

“Dennis,” a voice said.

He shuddered. Paige and Aisha were looking at him. Dammit. “I’m,” he started. The red lighting caught his eye. He flinched. He could _hear_ the low armor warning blare, be silenced as the repair modules cycled, then go off again, a never ending irritant that distracted him as he desperately ordered modules heated and unheated, barely keeping up with incoming damage, modules on the edge of burning out as heat damage crept up…

He didn’t know where he was, but he did know that _he had to warp_. Somehow. It was the only way to live. _Leviathan_ ’s plasma clouds blocked warp but he was nearly out of them. Dennis whirled for the navigations console, then froze. All the lights were out, and none of his officers were at their stations. What?

“Dennis, listen to me.” Paige repeated. She was looking at him seriously. “Tell me… tell me five things you can see.”

Dennis blinked, heart still racing and breath coming in short gasps. He glanced around jerkily. “You. Aisha. The console. The floor. The walls.”

Something _clunked_. Another artillery shell, he knew. The armor was—

“Four things you can hear.”

—was perfectly fine. “I can hear your voice. I can hear my voice. I hear… a fan, humming. I hear something ticking.”

“I turned on the lights,” Aisha said quietly.

“Tell me three things you can touch, and touch them.”

Dennis looked down at himself. “My clothes. You.” He tapped Paige. “I can touch this console.”

“Two things you like the smell of?”

“Coffee. Oranges.”

“Take a deep breath.”

He did.

The lights had slowly started coming on, he suddenly noticed. They were already bright enough to obscure the emergency ligh— _low armor klaxon_ no no, don’t think of that, think of Paige holding his hand, and then he was being lead down the hall and out the access hatch, and the precarious, dependable gangway, and Aisha was already waiting next to the cart, looking worried with her brows furrowed slightly. It felt like a dream, unreal in parts.

“Are you okay?” Aisha asked.

Dennis drew a shuddering breath, and tried to gather his wits. “Yeah.” He paused. “Thank you.”

“I’m sorry,” Aisha said. “I didn’t know that would… you know.” She waved a hand around.

“Not your fault,” Dennis said. He still felt on edge, and everything looked too bright and too real, but it was better than… just before. He leaned on the wall and sunk to a squat. “Just… let me catch my breath. Okay?”

They were probably staring at him. He could feel their gazes on him, heavier than mountains. But when he glanced up, Aisha was doing something on a pad and Paige was leaning on the wall just before the gangway, looking out towards the hangar.

That time was a lot worse than before. Dennis shuddered. It felt too real, too present, and if it had been just him on his own he probably would’ve stayed trapped like that. It was the dim red lights, and being on the bridge, and a dozen other factors he couldn’t consciously recall but which all added up. Fucking _Leviathan_.

He remembered someone saying that even if he wasn’t anxious, a fast heart rate would make him feel like he was. Dennis touched a hand to his chest. _Thump, thump, thump_. He took a deep breath again. Aisha glanced up.

“Just taking deep breaths,” Dennis said. “Don’t mind me.”

“Okay,” Aisha said, frowning a little, then looked back at her pad.

He hated how the flashback had made him feel. Helpless, just like that time six months ago with the Endbringer. Like he was still there. And he hated that it’d been so bad, in front of people instead of in the privacy of his own mind.

This time it had happened on his ship’s bridge. Would he feel a shiver of apprehension the next time he stepped on board? Would he break down again in front of his own _crew_? He really hoped that wouldn’t happen. He sighed, and slowly straightened. “Let’s go back.”

They got into the cart, and Aisha smoothly guided it into the hallway. Dennis stared off to the side, seated next to her, and Paige was in the back seat.

“Hey Dennis,” she said. “Are you feeling better?”

“A little.”

“Um, I think you should talk to Taylor about… it. She knows more about all this than I do.”

Dennis scowled, though Paige couldn’t see him. “I don’t—” trust Taylor, he was going to say, then realized it wasn’t really true. She’d helped him the first time.

Before he could think of something better to say, though, Paige continued. “They’re a big part of Captain life. Unless you’re going to hang up your uniform…”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then if only to make sure you can help.”

He looked away.

“I don’t mean to pressure…” Paige said slowly.

“No. You’re right.” He had more than just himself to look out for. He was a Captain. He was more able to fight, so he _should_ fight. “I’ll talk to her.”

“Maybe after the shore leave? Assuming you’re going, that is,” Paige said. “It’s today, if you haven’t heard.”

“I’d love to, if I’m allowed to go.” He smiled weakly. “I could really use some fresh air. Kinda getting sick of being on a ship.”

Aisha snorted. “Think you’re in the wrong career for that, Den.”

“Den?”

“Den.”

He raised an eyebrow at her, but she wasn’t looking.

“Back to the workshop?” Aisha asked.

“That sounds good,” Dennis said.

Making things was simple, meditative. He was sure it would make him feel better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks profHoyden, BeaconHill, tearlessNevermore for betaing. BeaconHill gets a chunk of fullerite-infused aerogel. Don’t touch it with your bare hands, and don’t put it in contact with metal. It, uh, reacts. Vigorously.
> 
> Thank you maroon_sweater for consulting on PTSD issues.


	9. Engagement Protocols, Part One of Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Protectorate frigate buzzes a manned Imperial Union signal relay and is promptly shot down.

Im Shira cursed loudly and struggled out of bed. She wasn’t _sleepy,_ because her implants took her from dreaming of nothing to fully awake in under a second. Disoriented, maybe. There was a sensation in her head—hard to describe, as most of the wetwired implant senses were—the kind that she’d learned to interpret as an enemy ship being nearby, but without enough resolution to tell how many or what type. She didn’t even need a clock in her room, because her implants were a cut above the standard Imperial Union suite. As sure as she could tell where her limbs were, she could tell it was thirteen twenty standard time, oh three fifty local time. Middle of the fucking night, and five seconds since waking up.

She jumped onto the floor and then swore again, hopping in place. Any colder and her bare feet would’ve frozen to the damn surface. She put on her slippers while hurriedly tying her hair with a band from her pyjama pockets and ran towards the control room of Military Relay D60B-6305-6A3E-5DCC-753B. She wouldn’t actually be able to remember the designation without drawing on her memo implant, of course. It wasn’t supposed to be important, but her commanding officer asked for the full designation half the time in the regular reports. The memo that nothing ever happened at the Relay must’ve missed the bastard.

It was a quick trip down the short living deck hall and up the ladder into the control room, a room about as big as a walk-in closet but dominated by the ceiling-height console and the small tactical map. Her mind bloomed with information as she pulled herself through the entry hatch and into the augmented information field around the console. It was a Protectorate frigate, ticker _PRT_ and icon colored orange, floating fifty kilometers off from the Relay. A bomber, Manticore-class, named _Impossibly Dense_ in the language the Protectorate used. They called it Common, which got confusing because the official language of the Union was also called Common, or _pǔtōnghuà_. The protocol for dealing with non-hostile enemy ships was straightforward.

Shira moved to the console, pushing away the chair. Typically she would use the tactical hologram, but it was just one ship. The implant controls would do. She started a target lock. The Relay’s automatic systems were sluggish, and would take nearly twenty seconds to finish locking the enemy. If there had been more crew on this piece of junk, a targeting specialist could’ve sped up and guided the tower to a successful lock in half the time. Shira wasn’t a targeting specialist. She watched the icon, arms crossed and finger tapping as she waited. Her bare feet were burning in the cold air, or maybe they were freezing. She wished she had some tea.

The lock circle blinked and turned solid.

Shira reached out to the weapons panel, the stasis webifier and pulse laser controls. Protocol said to lock a Protectorate frigate, wait a second, then fire a warning shot, directly into its hull. If it didn’t fuck off, fire more warning shots into the same spot. But before she could activate the weapons, the comms crackled into life.

 _“Shit, I was thinking everyone was asleep, it took so long to notice me.”_ It was a woman, speaking in Protectorate Common. _“What’s the local offset, even?”_

She _had_ been asleep, Shira thought wistfully. Then she flicked the switches for the webbing batteries and laser cannons. She imagined decades-old computers being kicked into action for the first time in a long while, struggling to train a cone of exotic particles onto the tiny target that was the frigate. In actuality, the webber engaged without a hitch.

“ _Okay. Not even a hi? Rude as all hell.”_

The bomber sluggishly changed direction. Shira was tempted to reply, but protocol said to maintain radio silence. She glanced at the external cameras. Its sensors weren’t up to the strain of focusing on the laser cannons, whiting out from the brightness. The bomber was moving _slightly_ faster, now, but that was enough to make most of her shots miss, or barely grazing its shields.

“ _Hah, you can’t even track a webbed bomber? Are y’all actually awake, or just rolling your faces over the controls in your sleep_?”

The _Impossibly Dense_ was talkative. It didn’t help that the Relay’s cannons _were_ useless, tracking about as well as a battleship’s main guns. “Dodge this,” she muttered, mostly to herself, then flicked on the laser flak, cycling the focal crystals to the longest range ones, the radio crystals. Beams from a light chamber would be scattered and refined through the focal crystal, and spread a staccato of pure energy across space. She hoped it would be enough to shut up the pilot.

“ _Ah, fuck. Hey, at least you can hit me at all. Even if it’s”_ —the woman sniffed contemptuously—“ _flak._ ” She didn’t sound afraid, though Shira couldn’t tell whether she was pretending very hard to be nonchalant or just didn’t give any fucks. She watched the sensor readouts in her mind, the approximations of how much shield, armor and hull the Manticore had left. The laser flak batteries the Relay had weren’t any better at tracking the frigate, but flak didn’t need to aim. The only way to avoid it was to stay out of the area of effect. The bomber’s shields dropped at a precipitous rate.

“ _Wait, shit. Union speak. Um… [hello? How are you?]”_

Shira snorted. The woman’s _pǔtōnghuà_ accent was _atrocious_. The bomber was in mid-armor now. Manticores put most of their pitiful defense in the shields. It wouldn’t last much longer.

Shira found herself pressing the comms transmit button. “I _can_ speak Common, you _idiot_.” A lot of Union people didn’t, soldier or not, but she considered herself fluent in Protectorate Common.

“ _Hey, she speaks! Pretty voice. Bye n—”_

The external cameras whited out and the voice channel dissolved into static. The Manticore turned into an expanding ball of fire from the reactor breach. The pieces of shit couldn’t get a clear image if their lives depended it on it. At least the tactical map’s sensors were better, able to pierce through the debris without any issue. The _Impossibly Dense_ ’s pilot probably had an escape pod, but it looked like the flak had popped that, too. There was nothing on the sensors except the wreck of the Manticore.

It wasn’t her first time. When she flew escort for freighters, she’d destroyed light tackle with her wing, pirate or Protectorate, and sometimes her beam lasers hit the cockpit instead of the hull. She felt a tiny pang of guilt when that happened—even though it wasn’t her fault, just shitty luck. Hers or the enemy pilot’s, she wasn’t sure. Part of the job, for sure. But she couldn’t really say she felt bad for _this_ particular idiot. Why had she even come here? There wasn’t any point Shira could see, and the woman had got blown up for her trouble. Possibly more importantly, did she really have to wake Shira from her sleep? She was going to be tired all day tomorrow.

She quickly reported the incident in the Relay’s log: _2318.02.30, Protectorate frigate ‘Impossibly Dense’ engaged per protocol and destroyed. No pod surviving._ Technically, the Relay had automated logs that recorded module activations and combat sensor data, but nobody checked those, since they dumped thousands of lines of data a day. Very little of it was useful, hence the manual logging. She tactfully left out the part where she had breached protocol by communicating with the enemy, and headed back downstairs. Her toes felt like they’d been frozen off. Maybe she could still save them if she got to bed fast enough?

* * *

The Relay was like a jail. Shira couldn’t go anywhere, or really stretch her legs. The supposedly-habitable outpost was little more than a tiny, cylindrical habitat bolted onto an immensely vertical, kilometer-long pylon made of dull grey tritanium. Internal space was at a premium when they built the thing, it seemed, because the hallway connecting the bedroom, kitchen and control room was so narrow that If Shira wanted to stretch her arms she’d need to turn sideways; the bedroom had very little floor space left over after the bed and dresser, and the kitchen was barely deserving of the name. The cooking she did was rarely more involved than heating up prepackaged meals that would never spoil.

More importantly, though, there was nothing to do. The first week or two she’d been stationed here she’d been diligent, but she’d quickly learned that the Relay practically ran itself. Watching a Relay wasn’t _meant_ to be punishment duty, but it was for her. She already missed her Imperial Navy Slicer, _Binari_ , which was collecting dust in the ship hangar. Three months total. She shouldn’t have let herself get baited by someone her senior. She didn’t even remember _what_ it was about, only that she’d overstepped in her reply. Two months left, then she could fly back to base. Where she belonged. She would keep her head down, after that.

She took a sip from her mug. Today was green tea from Joyo, tasting leafy and fresh. She’d brought an entire collection of tea when she’d been deployed. Loose tea, because tea bags and pills were about as good as coffee. She’d also brought a personal pad, of course, to access the internet from. That much was by regulations, though using it in front of the console… possibly less so.

She leaned back on the chair, lazily scanning the various sensor screens. Thanks to her implants she knew the gist of what was happening, but sometimes she liked to check with her own two eyes. D-scan was clear except for a Helios-class covert ops frigate that had appeared briefly before disappearing, presumably cloaked. It probably was a Werisen Cartel smuggler. The Relay was stationed close enough to the border to be in range of their operations. The local sensors showed nothing except the wreck from three days ago, slowly drifting away.

Shira carefully moved her cup to the side, then put her head down on her arms, on the little ledge with no controls on it. She needed to report to Middle-Lieutenant Lee later today. Another series of song-and-dance, the report would be, given the total lack of things going on. At least last time, just over two days ago, something _had_ happened. She wasn’t sure what she’d done to make him get on her case so hard, but it was stifling. She had to keep on best of behaviour to avoid getting her sentence extended, though, so all she could do is try to avoid making mistakes. Two more months, she told herself. Then she’ll never have to see him again.

Time stretched like taffy, thin and devoid of substance.

* * *

She was on the day’s third cup of orange-scented black tea when she felt the unsettling feeling of a ship approaching on D-scan, like being watched. Frigate. Griffin-class, fragile and built for jamming. The second visit by a ship this week, following the bomber three days ago. It exited warp, a quiet _thump_ to Shira, and landed at thirty kilometers, more than close enough for the IFF receivers to make out its name. _Personal Gravity Field_ , from the Protectorate. Shira reached for the console and started a target lock. The Relay’s sensors were jammed before it even got halfway. Shira glared at the orange triangle that was the _Personal Gravity Field_.

_“Hiya, still there?”_

A chill ran down her spine. She’d shot the other frigate down, killed the pod… But the woman speaking was the same voice as the one from a couple days ago, and had the same light tone.

_“Hello?”_

Was she a ghost or something? Shira nervously clenched and unclenched a hand. Only if she wasn’t jammed, she could’ve shot the frigate down. Protocol probably called for sending an alert to Command. She hesitated, brushing the HQ channel on the comms console.

“I killed you,” she said, instead activating local comms.

_“You did.”_

Shira bit her lip. Could she be a parahuman? “Are you a…” What was the Common word for _parahuman_? She tried to translate literally. “A… super man?” The words didn’t feel right in her mouth. Awkward. It’d been too many years since she’d spoken in the language of the Protectorate, not since graduating from the Lǚ Zhǒng Academy.

The Protectorate woman laughed. Comms were usually push-to-talk, meaning she was _intentionally_ transmitting it, to embarrass Shira. “No—well, yes, if that’s what you call it?”

“Chāorén,” Shira said, still feeling like the situation was unreal. “Or _cho-een_ , in my parents’ dialect.” Talking to someone who was dead would do that.

_“Literally super-man? Huh. Well, I’m a Captain. You could also say I have a specialty.”_

“You don’t die?”

 _“Not really.”_ There was a pause. _“I came back because I felt like you’re a familiar voice. Was curious.”_

“I’m going to have to kill you again.” The question was how, of course.

The woman laughed again. Maybe Shira had been uncharitable the first time, because it didn’t seem like she was mocking her. _“Hardly stopped me the first time. So what’s your name? Mine is Jennifer Cowling. Or Jenny.”_

Shira knew that name. She knew who Jennifer Cowling was. She was pretty sure that Jennifer hadn’t been a _parahuman_ when she was at the Academy—the school discouraged Protectorate parahumans from applying. It felt strange, to have considered someone who was now a parahuman, a friend. Most parahumans got whisked away to serve the country in the Yangban, or ran away to become pirates.

Old friend or not, chasing her away was more important. And anyways she hadn’t seen her for years. Shira focused on the situation. The frigate wasn’t moving relative to the Relay. She might be able to manually aim the stasis webifier, then slave the laser flak to the webifier’s firing arc in lieu of targeting sensors. She looked around for the full weapons console, instead of the simplified version installed on the main panel.

_“I’ve been thinking. Pretty much the only place I could’ve talked to an Imp—sorry, a Union citizen was the Academy…”_

There _was_ no full weapons console. Shira slammed her fist onto the little ledge in frustration. Who decided that was a good idea? And now there was an enemy frigate floating twenty kilometers away that she had no way to touch.

_“Um, are you going to tell me your name?”_

Maybe she could suit up really quickly and float over to the SMA to hop into _Binari_. But then the _Binari_ would get jammed. Did she really have to call it in? There was no reason not to, but…

_“Hellooo…”_

“Lower-Lieutenant Shira Im,” she snapped. She wasn’t _opposed_ to talking to Jennifer, but it was against regulations. She would feel much better if she minimized comms traffic. Jennifer was the enemy, but was that reason to be impolite? Her instincts and the regulations warred within her and the total came up _slightly guilty_ , so she added, “Hi, Jennifer.”

 _“Wait… Shira, like…? Wow. Um. Hi! I didn’t think you were the type to be military. Thought you’d like to set your own hours, stuff like that.”_ She sounded genuinely happy to meet Shira, for a certain definition of meet, and also ignorant of the fact that Shira was trying to figure out how to kill her. Again. Damn parahumans. At least she hadn’t _really_ killed someone she knew. But that wouldn’t have happened if Jennifer wasn’t a parahuman.

“I wasn’t,” she muttered.

_“Then why?”_

“Because”—her _hukou_ was about as good as rock bottom, Sector Five—”I’d like to live somewhere that’s”—not a shithole—“somewhere nicer.”

_“Oh right, you guys have, well, basically a caste system, huh? You said you were from a low caste?”_

“It’s not a caste system,” Shira said. “My home is a planet in Sector Five, though. And can you please stop jamming me?”

 _“So you can blow me out of the sky?”_ She sounded like she was smiling.

“I will have to request backup if you don’t. I don’t want to.” It would mean more paperwork and more military presence, for no good reason.

_“I promise I won’t stay here all day. I just wanted to catch up.”_

“‘Catch up?’”

_“You know. Talk about how we’re doing, what you’ve been up to after graduating. Did you hear that the Academy might be closed?”_

“I… No. I didn’t. Why?”

 _“There’s been fewer people applying after Behemoth...”_ A brief image of the ball of fire that had been the Endbringer flashed through her mind’s eye. Sweltering heat even through the climate control of her cockpit. _“But mostly, it’s because they don’t like people from both sides intermingling.”_

Shira wet her lips before speaking. “Who’s they?”

_“Well, you know. They.”_

“I don’t know.”

_"The powers that be. The mysterious figures that run the government. Old guys in a room. I don’t even know if it’s just the Protectorate, or if it’s the Union too, but I’d bet a lot of things that it’s both.”_

“I see.” The Union-side Academy president was some sort of politician, and the Protectorate one was apparently a distinguished ex-admiral. “I wouldn’t like it to be closed.”

_“Me neither.”_

For a dozen heartbeats, the only sound Shira heard was the quiet whirr of machinery. A question clawed its way to her mouth, though, and she voiced it with only a little hesitation. “Jennifer?”

_“Mm?”_

“When did you become a—” She caught herself. She’d almost said _super-man_ again. That would’ve been embarrassing. “When did you get a talent?”

_“Not long after we graduated. I’d rather not talk about it, though.”_

“Why?”

Jennifer didn’t reply immediately. _“Do you know how people find out they have a specialty?”_

“No.”

_“When they’re pushed to the brink, when it’s a do-or-die situation, you find something in yourself that you never knew you had. But you don’t ever forget about how it happened.”_

“I didn’t know that,” Shira said. “I thought it just… happened.”

Jennifer chuckled darkly. _“Yeah, I don’t think the Imperial Union would_ want _people to know how they get specialties.”_

“What does that mean?”

 _“Nothing. Forget I—”_ She caught herself. _“It’s they, Shira. They.”_

“I… see.”

This silence had clearly eaten the previous one, because it was twice as long. Shira drummed her fingers against the console’s ledge. “You should go.”

 _“Make me?”_ Shira was about to say something when Jennifer added, _“Just kidding. Mark my words, though, I’ll be back.”_

“Go. _Please_.”

 _“Going,”_ Jennifer replied cheerfully. Shira felt the Griffin-class frigate slowly accelerate and warp away. She hoped Jennifer stayed away.

Shira didn’t log the encounter.

* * *

She was lying on the console room floor, a gently steaming cup of jasmine tea sitting in the corner of the room so she wouldn’t knock it over easily. She wasn’t tall, but neither was the room very wide. The cold of the Relay seeped into her skin through the thin industrial carpet. Her official shift was over, but she stayed here because she didn’t feel like going elsewhere. It was all the same. Her pad laid abandoned next to her, where she’d put it after she was bored of watching shows. The last advertisement she’d seen was on her mind. Propaganda, more like. _Our freedom was built on the barrel of a laser_ , proclaimed a vaguely patriotic male voice while an Imperial Navy dreadnought fired its full salvo of lasers. _Do your part. Enlist now._ She had, sortof. Not as an enlisted, but as a pilot. She’d gone to the Academy because it was one of the few flight schools that didn’t consider _hukou_ , and it wasn’t as competitive. The sons and daughters from core sector families were carefully sheltered from any real danger. She thought she’d known what danger was, but _Behemoth_ disabused her of that notion. It had waded through two fleets with contemptuous ease, and left on its own terms, Shira thought, no matter what UCTV said. But she’d lived. Signed up. Gone through training, gotten what the flight leader had called ‘useless civilian practices’ beaten out of her, just to be stuck here in a Relay, staring up at the decade-old ceiling tiles—probably not even made of tritanium. Two more months.

Home was Sector Five—a collection of badlands, new colonies and undesirables. It was Hwahyeon III, a strategic colony on the border—a nominally temperate planet burdened by heavy ice caps and a thin equatorial living zone. Jiawang District— _home_ home—was a city where icy winds wound through squat black buildings and cut through her parka like it was made of cotton, where summer was barely more than an afterthought on the tail-end of a long season of snow and hail.

Her father had been a microclime technician, growing food inside the massive greenhouse-ecosystem. Her mother still was. Her family had always been well-off for Sector Five citizens, but money didn’t help much for jobs, admission to schools, or planetary visas. Bureaucracy was the lifeblood of the Union, and it was highly unlikely she could get permission to visit any planet Sector Three or up. Stations were easier to visit, but stations were the same everywhere.

Uji, Joyo, Mara, Longtian, Okcheon, Huangbeol… all Sector Three or higher, with two being Sector One. New Yunnan used to be one of the big planets, too, but it was gone, to the _Leviathan_. Planets with the right climate to grow tea, which meant pleasantly warm weather year-round. She would give a lot to visit one for vacation, and a lot more to live there. Which was, she supposed, why she was here. Do her duty as a frigate pilot, and possibly have the opportunity to move her _hukou_.

As if to punctuate that thought, she felt the prickle of an approaching ship just as the console chimed. Shira sighed, and rolled upright. A Griffin-class frigate exited its warp tunnel and slid to a complete stop exactly in jamming range. Skilled pilot, she thought, as the console beeped again, a different tone. Jammed. The light over the local comms channel blinked. Shira sighed again, standing slowly.

_“Hi.”_

“What do you want? Why do you keep coming back?” Her voice rose in frustration. “I told you to go away.”

_“I did. I came back. I want to talk, that’s all. I won’t attack the station outside of keeping myself from being blown up.”_

“You don’t die.”

_“It’s still a bit expensive.”_

“Fine, then. Talk.” Shira dropped into her seat. She just didn’t need to engage her. Shira reached for her tea, but it wasn’t in its usual spot. Oh, right. It was still on the floor.

 _“I don’t know how it works in the Union, but the Protectorate tries not to advertise just how many neutral stations are out there.”_ Jennifer stopped, waiting for an answer that didn’t come, then continued anyways. _“You know, they’re not pirates, but they also don’t follow all of the laws. There’s a lot of them in the no man’s land between the Union and Protectorate. Protectorate can’t touch’m without giving the Union an excuse to fight us, and vice versa. So I’m staging out of one of those. Easier than flying a dozen light years every time.”_ Her tone went up a little at the end, like she was inviting her to share in the little joke. Shira tried to focus on the article she had called up on her pad. She wasn’t even sure what it was about.

Jennifer talked about a job she’d done that had gone horribly wrong—she’d flown as a freelancer right after graduating until she got her talent, she added. A mining guild operating off of some planet near the Border Exclusion Volume—or more typically, the no man’s land—had requested for her team to apprehend some illegal mining barges. _“They weren’t just illegal barges,”_ she said, a little unnecessarily. _“It was a front for Werisen Cartel smugglers. They fought back, and they lasted long enough for Cartel reinforcements to arrive. We weren’t equipped to fight what they brought. Two strategic cruisers and a dictor, and two combat-fit mining barges against a ragtag band of combat cruisers, tactical destroyers and interceptors. I was captaining a destroyer. I was so sure I would die on the next volley, dozens and dozens and dozens of times during that fight.”_ Her voice was distant, towards the end. _“Never did, though.”_

“Wait,” Shira said, then remembered she was supposed to be ignoring her.

_“Yes, Shira?”_

Shira cursed inwardly, then decided to go for it. “Didn’t you say you didn’t want to…”

 _“I changed my mind,”_ Jennifer said, in a tone that told Shira she was grinning, though she was unsure how sincere it was. _“And... my mind went there. I just said it out loud. Not really your fault.”_ She chuckled. _“I think I made it awkward.”_

“Maybe a little,” Shira said. The silence threatened to stretch, but Shira pressed down the transmit button before it could. “So, you said you signed up for the Navy after that.”

* * *

Shira swirled her mug of jasmine tea around, watching the petals and tea leaves drift, waiting for Lee to check in for the two-day report. She’d sent Jennifer away soon enough, with the true excuse of having to do a report. The woman liked talking, and wasn’t fazed at all by Shira’s minimal engagement. Shira had told her to not come back; she didn’t think Jennifer would listen. She needed to think of a way to get rid of Jennifer more permanently. Most of the ideas she had involved getting into _Binari_ and chasing her, and she wasn’t entirely sure whether it was a rational decision.

The console blinked, and her implant told her the comms were from Relay HQ. She stiffened her spine and sat at attention, before opening the line. “Loyalty. Lower-Lieutenant Im Shira,” she said briskly, biting off each syllable of her name. “Stationed at Signal Relay seven five three B, reporting, sir.“

 _“Lower-Lieutenant Im,”_ Lee said, _“that is not the full name of your station.”_

Shira clenched her teeth briefly, then called up her implant’s memo function. “Lower-Lieutenant Im Shira, stationed at Signal Relay D six zero B…” She quickly rattled off the twenty digits of the Relay. Lee was a stickler to protocol, especially protocol that was annoying. Some days he didn’t make her, but clearly today was a full identifier day. She couldn’t even complain—he was perfectly allowed to request it. “...three B, reporting as ordered, sir.”

If this had been in person, Lee probably would’ve looked her up and down, trying to find any small fault in Shira’s posture, or her uniform. As it was, he simply barked, _“Full report.”_

“Sir. The Relay systems remain operational. The shield generator has had a one hundred percent uptime. The weapons batteries pass self-diagnostics. The civilian traffic nodes remain under fifty percent saturation. The military traffic node has reported latency within guidelines. The life support systems are estimated last two hundred thirty six days, and prepackaged meal consumption is on-track with ten day surplus.” As it had been last time, minus two days worth of change. It was really a waste of time for everyone.

 _“Hmm,”_ was all Middle-Lieutenant Lee said.

Shira made sure the transmit button was not pressed before sighing. He always did this stupid… _thing_. A sort of power play. A typical superior would reply with an _acknowledged_ , maybe even an _at ease_ , but Lee always made her ask if it was satisfactory, and kept her at attention the entire report. No wonder he was assigned to Relay supervisory duty, nobody could handle his shit. Two months, she told herself. “Sir, is this acceptable?”

_“It is, Lower-Lieutenant Im. Have there been further enemy sightings?”_

“The Relay has captured sporadic covops traces on D-scan. I believe there may be a Werisen Cartel route within range, and...” Shira’s heartbeat quickened.

_“And?”_

“Nothing, sir.”

The line was quiet.

_“Tell me the range of the Relay D-scan.”_

Shira briefly scowled before forcing her expression blank. “Two hundred forty AU, sir, depending.” The Relay had larger D-scan range than most ships, which had 42 AU range, but less than specialized D-scan stations, some of which went far past a thousand.

_“Have you calibrated the range?”_

“No, sir, the Relay does not have the tools for that.”

Lee didn’t reply for a while, as if he was pondering what to annoy her with next. _“Have you inspected the laser cannons?”_

Shira could see what was coming from a thousand klicks out. “Sir, the regulations say—”

 _“Lower-Lieutenant Im, it is a soldier and watchman’s duty to keep their tools in optimal shape at_ all _times.”_

She was hardly a watchman. She was a _pilot_. “Sir.”

_“So have you inspected the laser cannons?”_

“No, sir.”

_“Run through the full standard test battery. I want a copy of the results on the next report.”_

Shira scowled, though she kept her finger far away from the transmit. She wasn’t some, some, _relay tech_. She was a _pilot_. And even going by protocol, taking the recent firing into account there was no _need_ to inspect the cannons for another four months. With the limited tools in the Relay, she wouldn’t even be able to fix any defects that weren’t absurdly simple, like replacing a depleted focal crystal. The whole process would make her suit and desuit multiple times. Shira took a couple of deep breaths, and made sure her teeth were not clenched. “Yes, sir. Concluding my report, sir.”

_“Acknowledged. Out.”_

She could feel her pulse in her head, urging her to action, but there wasn’t anything to do anything _to_. She bounced her leg a few times before standing up abruptly. The chair bounced off the wall and back into the back of her knees, but she ignored the pain and dropped through the hatch to the hallway. There, she paced, even if she couldn’t take more than four or five steps before having to turn around. The soles of her shoes clanged loudly against the tiles, and she didn’t take any care to take lighter steps. The sound reverberated through the structure, quickly sounding like it came from all directions, like a giant was walking on a catwalk larger than a building. She had to stop after that. The sounds died down eventually, but her thoughts stayed jumbled.

The laser cannons waited, she eventually told herself. She walked towards the control room again to get the mission checklist.

* * *

Shira irritably tugged a brush through her hair the next morning, feeling her stiff and sore arm muscles complain at the motion. It had taken three hours, with multiple de-suit/re-suit cycles because she needed to come back inside to test-fire the cannons after many of the steps. The damn tests were supposed to be conducted by two people for a reason. She shook out some chocolate black tea into a tea infuser and let it steep while she brushed her teeth. Breakfast was optional, and Shira was in the habit of skipping.

Just as she picked up her mug from the kitchen to go to the control room, she felt her implant tingle, telling her there was a ship nearby. She looked up, towards the control room, then figured whoever it was could wait and slowly climbed up the ladder to the control room with her mug in one hand. It took a bit of acrobatics, but she made it without gaining a second-degree burn. More data flooded into her awareness. It was Jennifer’s Griffin, again, and already jamming the Relay’s sensors, from what she could tell. Shira took her time, setting her cup on the console and checking D-scan, and made herself as comfortable as she could in her seat. She touched the _transmit_ button. “You came back.”

_“Did you miss me?”_

“Hmm,” she said. She drank some of her tea. The chocolate softened the bitter aftertaste of black tea. It worked out.

_“Is that a yes?”_

“It’s not a no.”

 _“A yes, then,”_ she said with a chuckle.

“It is against regulations.”

 _“I hear a_ but _in there.”_

Shira looked into the depths of her cup. “It’s better than talking to my superior.”

_“What happened?”_

“Nothing.”

_“Nothing.”_

“Nothing except following the rules. All of them. Even the ones that are optional.”

_“God, I hate that kind of person. Ugh. Is he not your usual superior?”_

“No. Which is good. I don’t think I would be able to handle him. I’m an interceptor pilot, not a station-keeper. My wing leader is… she’s okay.”

_“Just okay?”_

“Yes. And she’s very good at her job, or at least that’s what everyone says.” Jennifer didn’t reply immediately, so Shira had more of her hot tea.

_“Have I ever told you how cute your accent is?”_

“What?” Shira blinked at the speaker.

_“Like, you pronounce Vs like Ws. It’s unique, I don’t think I’ve ever had that with anyone else.”_

Shira flushed. “I can’t help it.”

 _“No, I like it! It’s cool.”_ The woman was probably grinning, from her tone. Which made Shira feel smaller. _“I think I’ve definitely mentioned it before. I don’t think I could’ve resisted the urge to.”_

Shira didn’t know what to say to that.

_“Sorry, tangent. Where was I? Oh. Yeah, people who abuse the book. I mean, I’m not really in a position where there’s many of those left above me, anymore, but I’ve had the experience.”_

Shira carefully thought about her words before saying them. She made sure not to pick any words with the offending consonants in them. “What do you mean, not many left?”

_“I’m a captain, just under the admiral ranks.”_

“I’m not sure what a captain is equal to in our navy,” Shira said slowly. She ran through the rank list in her head. Right under the admiralty? “A… senior commander?”

_“Don’t ask me.”_

Shira sighed. “If I were a senior commander I’d probably quit the navy. And live off pension or something. Freelance.”

 _“That sounds more like the Shira I know,”_ Jennifer said wryly. _“Maybe you should fly around or something. I can’t believe you’re still sane all cooped up in there.”_

“Then I will have to shoot you down. It’s obligatory.”

_“I’ll keep you jammed.”_

Shira snorted. “I can shoot manually. I tagged half the enemy team that one time at the Academy. They thought jamming would keep them safe, too.”

_“And I’m sure you’ll feel very bad about killing your poor old friend.”_

“I…” Shira furrowed her brows in confusion. “But you’ll be back?”

 _“Yes.”_ One could say that grinning was Jennifer’s default expression. _“I can still guilt you about it, though. So cold-hearted. Is that how you say hi in the Imperial Union Navy? With a smile and a murder?”_

“Shut up,” Shira said, though she was smiling. “That’s what you get for trying to shoot at an enemy Relay in a frigate. Really, what were you thinking?”

_“Ah, sorry, I can’t tell you. Opsec.”_

Shira stopped in her figurative tracks. Jennifer was an enemy soldier. This was fraternization. “Right,” she said weakly.

Neither of them said anything for a while. What was Jennifer thinking?

 _“Hey,”_ she said, a note of something Shira couldn’t quite identify in her tone. Concern, apprehension, hesitation, guilt?

“I understand,” Shira said.

_“Shira—”_

“It’s fine.”

They didn’t talk too much more before she left.

* * *

She hesitated, a lot longer than before, but the machinations of the Imperial Navy rumbled on, remaining entirely ignorant of the women that visited her Relay.

* * *

The day was an astringent, dark green tea when Jennifer returned three days later. The presence of the Griffin-class frigate sat as a physical presence in Shira’s brain, just like Jennifer did in her mind. The frigate started jamming the Relay once more, but Shira didn’t pay much attention to it. She’d almost believe the frigate’s mission was to sit here and jam the Relay, except that would be a gross waste of resources.

 _“Hi,”_ Jennifer said.

Shira drummed the console, looking at the external camera feeds and the image of the tiny blue-gray ship. She could still suit up, EVA to the ship maintenance array then desuit to get into her ship. It would take over twenty minutes, wasn’t really part of her job description, and by the time the _Binari_ would leave the hangar, space would likely be empty again. Any respectable space station would have tackle modules to keep them from immediately leaving, and quick-deploy interceptor or fighter tubes to actually destroy the interlopers. Unfortunately, the Relay was as respectable as a seedy back alley dealer.

“Jennifer. Why do you keep coming out here? Is this opsec, too?”

There was a long pause. Perhaps she hadn’t expected her to reply. _“Ah. Well. The_ Personal Gravity Field _isn’t a Navy ship.”_

“It’s… yours?”

_“Mine. I needed something cheap that wouldn’t blow up when your Relay looks at it funny. I’m also not on duty right now.”_

Shira pursed her lips. Assuming she was telling the truth… “Why?”

Another brief pause. _“To talk to you, mostly. I think it’s worth it. And it’s just a Griffin. Not even fully fit.”_

“I see,” Shira said, despite the fact that she didn’t. Frigates weren’t exactly a purchase Shira would be able to make on a whim, fully-fit or not.

_“Yeah.”_

Neither of them said anything for a long while. She wished she could tell what she’d been thinking, or even her expressions whenever she said something. Voice only conveyed so much emotion.

“So you’re spending your money and your time, just to come here, where you might be killed.”

 _“I mean, I think we’ve established pretty well that you can’t scratch my paint,”_ Jennifer said lightly. _“And I don’t really die. But… yes.”_

“Do you always put in so much effort just to talk to your enemies?”

_“You’re not really my enemy, Shira.”_

“How am I not?”

_“Well.”_

A placeholder word, followed by the silence of someone trying to figure out what to say, or how to say it. Shira waited, thinking of the Academy. It had always been Jennifer who made the first move. Always. She’d been a hand offered to a shy girl from Sector Five, out of place among her Imperial Union peers from higher sectors.

When she did speak, Jennifer’s voice was quiet. _“Don’t take it wrong, but… you’re not The Enemy, just a girl I knew who flies one ceptor. Top notch skills, still just one person. You’re not the dreadnoughts that lay siege to a base, the cruisers that destroy crucial shipments, the brass who give orders that cause so many deaths. You’re Imperial Union, but you’re not **the** Imperial Union.”_

This was why you didn’t let soldiers talk to the other side. They became people. Shira sank back into her chair—when had she stood up?—feeling strangely weak, and took a sip of warm tea, savoring the taste. It hit her tongue like a wall at first, but the bitterness had dimensions to it. Let it sit a little and it melted into something grassy, something paradoxically sweet while being a kind of astringency. She looked up at the low ceiling, leaning back in her chair.

It was her turn, she thought. She sat up straighter, then reached for the transmit button. “You said you had so-called nice superiors. I’m not so convinced they exist.”

They’d been trading silences all today. Those pauses had deeper meaning, she was sure, but maybe it simply didn’t translate through the comms. The only silence the comms spoke was an oppressive dialect.

 _“Shira,”_ Jennifer said, voice sounding weird. She made a sound that could’ve been a half-cough, then halted again. _“Maybe nice superiors are extinct in the Union, but I swear, the Protectorate has a strategic reserve of them.”_

Shira smiled a little. “Tell me about it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Homecoming_ , by keira (author of _Fault)_ has been elevated to a canon side-story . You can safely assume that any details in Homecoming are true for canon. Go read [it](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13570230/chapters/31143756) if you haven’t!
> 
> There’s nifty cover art for Teatime with Jane now! And has been there for a couple months! It's right [here](https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/41439393/), or on the first page.
> 
> Writing Engagement Protocols took a month or two and a lot of people weighing in. Thanks to profHoyden, BeaconHill, Gaia, and Harbin for reading my thing over. Thanks maroon_sweater for ~~complaining about~~ _advising_ on military matters.
> 
> Confession: I haven’t actually finished Part Two but I wanted the hiatus to stop so here’s part one. You see, I've been holding onto this for 2 months or more, now, and I'm sick and tired of it so I am pushing it out. We'll see if I actually manage to finish Part Two within any reasonable timeframe. Writing a conclusion to a longish story is pretty hard.


	10. Engagement Protocols, Part Two of Two

“You don’t like tea?”

_“No. I’m more of a coffee girl. Tea doesn’t taste very good.”_

“Coffee doesn’t taste very good.”

_“Your taste is terrible.”_

Shira snorted, and took a sip of her tea, tasting the chrysanthemum that bloomed in her cup. “I’m going to make you have some. Somehow.”

Jennifer laughed. _“Try me.”_

“I could put some in an escape pod, fire it at you.”

_“I know that piece of shit doesn’t have pods on it.”_

“I can neither confirm nor deny that statement, _Personal Gravity Field_.”

A sip of tea’s worth of time later, the reply issued back. “ _Okay, you do have some pods. I’ll just shoot them down.”_

“Shielded pods with evasion systems?”

_“I’m a good shot.”_

“I could jam you then evade your dumbfire.”

_“What the hell kind of escape pods does the Union give you, Shira?”_

“The tea-delivering kind.”

Jennifer laughed again, for longer this time, and it warmed her more than the tea that she was transmitting those laughs, because it meant she wanted her to hear them, thought Shira would appreciate hearing them—and, it turned out, Shira did.

* * *

“No contacts on D-scan for the previous forty eight hours, sir.”

“Acknowledged.”

It would have been a spike of activity in the dead hours between when Jennifer left and came back again, but that was a gracious term for the daily reports. Was it really a spike if it was maybe five percent more engaging than listening to the background radiation wash over the station’s exceptionally dull sensors? Probably not.

* * *

_“I gathered you don’t always pilot this, uh, stick.”_

Shira was briefly torn between a desire to deny that she had anything to do with the Relay, and an instinctive urge to defend its honor. “It’s… yes, maybe it _is_ a stick, not a station. It sort of runs itself.”

_“What do you do? You’re a ceptor pilot, why are you on a stick? Er, without, you know…”_

“It’s not exactly classified information,” Shira said. “I sit here all day, and have to sit here for another month and half, for punishment for… things. I normally fly interceptors and fast tackle, and my personal ship is an Imperial Navy Slicer.”

 _“Ooh, those. Nasty little fuckers. Sorry,”_ she added.

Shira grinned. “Like I said. Outrange anything you could fly, jams or not, from more than fifty kilometers away.”

 _“Range like that is unfair on a frigate,”_ Jennifer said.

“Fair is for losers,” Shira replied.

_“What?”_

“I’m trying to imply you are a loser.”

Jennifer sputtered, and Shira sipped her barley tea in quiet triumph.

* * *

She’d committed to not mentioning Jennifer. She would report that no one had approached, under the razor-sharp, metaphorical gaze of Middle-Lieutenant Lee. He didn’t pry, and she didn’t offer. He didn’t order her to do anything else in strict accordance with all regulations yet ultimately unnecessary, and she continued to display outstandingly low amounts of initiative. Jennifer’s secret, _her_ secret burned inside her chest. She tried very hard not to think of the fact that willfully failing to report, let alone engage, Jennifer was technically, treason. Nobody had to know.

* * *

Standing in the kitchen, Shira had ripped opened another packaged meal—it was probably supposed to be a spicy tofu thing, but she would be surprised if it actually was—when she felt the dull sensation of a ship nearby. She thought for a brief second, then dropped the meal on the counter and headed to the console.

“Hi Jennifer.”

_“Hey. Are you always on duty, or…?”_

“Implants. Even if I’m asleep, it wakes me up if there’s a ship nearby.”

Jennifer hmmed. _“Sounds handy.”_

“Didn’t you think implants were unnatural, before, like way back then?” The propaganda always emphasized how dim a view the Protectorate took of implants. How they were so backwards. Clinging to a long-gone past, rejecting progress, or something like that. The fact that most component blueprints were ‘borrowed’ from the Protectorate—and thus were written in their Common—was never dwelled upon too long.

 _“I did.”_ Shira tried to take a sip of tea, but her hand closed on empty space. Her mug was still in the kitchen. _“I changed my mind.”_

She hung there for a moment like stepping off a plane, not knowing if her parachute would work. She would never find out if she didn’t take the step, though. “Why?” she asked.

Jennifer sighed. _“Doesn’t really matter. The Protectorate doesn’t know this, and they don’t need to know this. My talent—”_

“Coming back to life.”

_“Not quite. My consciousness is transferred—”_

“What? How?”

Jennifer’s voice sounded a little amused. _“Don’t ask me, nobody knows how exactly talents work. My consciousness is transferred when I’m about to die, but that needs implants. And I’m not about to tell the Protectorate that I’m technically a cyborg.”_

“I don’t understand why they do that.”

 _“History,”_ Jennifer said. _“I don’t know the specifics. It’s been a while.”_

“You took history?”

_“You didn’t?”_

Shira frowned at the speaker, until she realized that Jennifer couldn’t see her. “It never really interested me.”

_“You have ‘net in that box, don’t you? Look it up.”_

* * *

_“It’s a really big station, considering it’s neutral, and in unsafe space,”_ Jennifer said. _“The hangar’s only sized for up to medium-class ships”_ —cruisers and _maybe_ battlecruisers, depending on whether the architects were feeling generous when they made the plans— _”but it’s pretty sizeable. Dunno who runs it, pretty sure it’s Cartel-linked.”_

“I feel like we—the Union should’ve destroyed it already,” Shira said slowly. “Or the Protectorate, I guess.”

 _“If either side moves in on the station, they’d get engaged by the other side,”_ Jennifer said. _“Of course, both sides could cooperate and attack it together, or at least turn a blind eye, but…”_

“Would require our navies agreeing on something.”

 _“Precisely.”_ Shira scooped some of the surprisingly edible _mapo_ tofu into her mouth and chewed as she thought. _“And like I said, it’s a big station, and installations are exponentially tougher by size. It’s not going to get attacked any time soon. Which is good, because I like their facilities. They have a micro-gee swimming pool.”_ Her tone went up at the end, like she was grinning. _“Can you swim?”_

“A little.”

_“It’s great. Would be nice if we could go together.”_

Which they wouldn’t ever, probably. Unless Shira quit the Navy and decided to be a freelancer or work for the Werisen Cartel or something. “Yeah,” she said. She bit into the bland biscuit.

* * *

The answer to the implant question was quite boring, actually, in that there was no answer, only speculation. Some outbreak on a frontier planet, a power-fueled virus that had jumped from implant to implant and subverted an entire colony? The personal agendas of mysterious oligarchs behind the scene? Random perturbations in probabilistic events that snowballed a mild disinclination into something meaningful and full of hatred? She didn’t think there was anything interesting that could come of bringing it up to Jennifer, so she didn’t, and then she forgot about it.

* * *

The dull green wulong leaves were fully unfurled in the warm water. Shira had started to take a sip, but a light on the console caught her eye just as she was made aware of an incoming transmission through her implant. She looked at the console quizzically. Her regular report was tomorrow, and this wasn’t the right type of comms for Jennifer, or even for Lee. Relayed, internal, encrypted. She accepted the comms and put it on speakers.

 _“Lower Lieutenant Im!”_ Lee barked, causing the speakers to briefly max out.

Shira jumped a little. “Lower Lieutenant Im Shira!” she said automatically. She wanted to ask why he was checking in on a non-report day, but kept that question to herself. Lee didn’t appreciate interruptions.

 _“This is a status report,”_ Lee said. _“D-scan?”_

Shira checked with her implant—nothing out there except a Griffin, which she was pretty sure she knew the owner of—and started to reply, but someone else started speaking on comms.

_“Think very carefully before you reply, Lower Lieutenant Im.”_

A shiver ran down Shira’s spine. It was a woman, and she spoke with authority. Her words were clear, perfectly enunciated, the kind that could cut through the noise of a crowd while hardly raising her voice. She pushed the hesitancy out of her voice. “Who am I speaking to, ma’am?”

_“Junior Commander Wu Akiko.”_

“Loyalty,” she said, giving a salute. Not that Wu could see. She didn’t recognize the name, not really, but the rank… Wu Akiko was, at the very least, commander of this region of space. She outranked Lee, too.

 _“Loyalty. I am here to follow up on some minor discrepancies,”_ Wu said calmly. _“Our Relays are the backbone of communications for our nation, and their functioning is of utmost priority.”_

“Yes, ma’am,” Shira said. The Relays were barely military-grade hardware, and definitely not important enough for a commander to check up on. A prickle of awareness told her that a Griffin-class frigate had just passed the maximum range of the Relay’s D-scan. Dammit. Something was up, here, but she wasn’t sure why.

 _“I understand that you have done maintenance on the D-scan recently,”_ Wu said.

“Yes ma’am,” Shira said. Maintenance. That’s what she’d put in her report. And what she _had_ done, for some definition of that term. “I inspected the systems, according to the protocols.”

_“Any problems?”_

“None that I could detect, ma’am, using the built-in diagnostics.”

_“Is there anything wrong with the built-ins?”_

“No, ma’am, but they’re limited. An actual engineer is better than the built-ins, and I am not an engineer.”

 _“Right,”_ Wu said brisky. _“Report?”_

“D-scan has been clear, ma’am.”

There was a long pause.

 _“I see,”_ Wu finally said. _“Even with full sensitivity?”_

“Clear, ma’am,” Shira said, feeling like she’d just said the wrong thing. Why would she ask again? The sensation of Jennifer’s Griffin weighed on her mind as a physical sensation.

_“Interesting. The range of your Relay is…?”_

“Two hundred forty AU, ma’am,” Shira said, brows furrowing.

_“And you are unaware of the fact that there is a Griffin-class frigate in your Relay’s general vicinity.”_

Shira sucked in breath through her teeth. “No, ma’am,” she said, a little quieter than she normally would’ve. It was the best she could manage. “There’s nothing on D-scan.” Nothing except Jennifer. As if to remind her, the Local comms channel light began blinking.

 _“Lower Lieutenant Im, we have a Proteus-class sensor boat feeding us this info. What do you think that means?”_ A dedicated mobile sensor platform, including top-notch D-scan and an entire team of engineers. Much more trustworthy than a Relay’s systems.

Shira wasn’t sure whether the Commander was offering her an out. “There’s the possibility that the D-scan sensors have a defect that isn’t detectable by the diagnostics, ma’am.”

 _“I happen to agree,”_ Wu said. _“To that end, I will dispatch a repair crew to the Relay.”_

“Understood, ma’am.” A maintenance team would figure out that D-scan was working perfectly fine, unless she sabotaged it herself. How would she do that in a way that didn’t trace back to her? She racked her brain for a time when D-scan had self-diagnosed to be working but wasn’t. Only a few times, and each time she’d handed it off to engineers who actually knew what they were doing.

There was a brief pause. _“One more thing. Middle-Lieutenant Lee will be accompanying the team, as a commanding officer_. _”_ Shira’s breath caught in her throat. _“He has expressed a personal interest in making sure the Relays are running optimally. I’ve given him permission to investigate this breakdown to the full extent of his and the repair crew’s abilities.”_

Fuck, Shira breathed. Lee, with full discretion to investigate? He wasn’t going to bring a repair crew, he was going to bring forensics, full log dump, part-by-part breakdown, if it came to that. It was suddenly too hot in the control room. She abruptly stood up and started pacing the tiny tiny room, barely taking three steps before she had to turn around. Lee was going to look at the logs and find out what she’d been doing and find a way to get her punished for talking to Jennifer and Shira didn’t have a way to hide from _forensics_ , she wasn’t a hacker, she didn’t know how to cover her traces, or have the tools… Shira turned around at the other end of the room as Wu continued to speak.

 _“—and further details will be coordinated by Middle-Lieutenant Lee. Any questions?”_ Wu’s voice was as calm and unruffled as at the start of the conversation.

“No, ma’am,” she said, her voice sounding so small. Her pulse pounded in her head, and she didn’t think she could keep standing from how weak her legs felt.

 _“Wu out.”_ The channel closed. Shira sank into her chair. She had to—she had to do something. She stood back up, but her implant tingled. Tingled again. She remembered that Jennifer was here. She stared at the console, the little light under “LOCAL-DIRECTED-1” blinking. On, for half an eternity; off, for the remainder. Glanced at the hatch to below. The four walls around her—six, if she counted the floor and ceiling. Her heart was still racing.

The light still blinked.

Shira slowly raised her hand to the square toggle button and pushed it in with a _click_.

_“Hello? Shira? Is everything okay?”_

“No,” she croaked. She drank some of her tea. It tasted like nothing. She gulped down what was left, but only a faint bitter taste told her she’d had it.

_“What happened?”_

“They _know_.”

_“What?”_

“Lee’s going to investigate the Relay.” Shira stared at the limp leaves at the bottom of her cup. “He’s going to be thorough.”

_“Shira—”_

Her voice sounded hollow, even to herself. “It’s going to be at the least negligence. If he finds out about you, it’s going to be treason.”

 _“I’m—”_ Jennifer cut herself off.

Shira put her head down on the console, trembling. Her next words came out a little muffled, but she couldn’t really care. “I can’t do anything about it.”

_“How would he even know?”_

“The logs.”

_“You could delete them.”_

“Not well enough to fool a forensics team.”

_“What kind of logs?”_

“Raw sensor data. Combat logs. D-scan diagnostics records.”

A pause.

_“You knew, though.”_

Shira sat up straight again. “I didn’t think they would ever do a full audit, not in a thousand years.” Especially given the state of the outlying stations.

_“Well, now they are, and you’re—sorry to say—in some deep shit. Plans?”_

“I don’t have one.”

_“Tough luck.”_

“You could blow up the D-scan?”

_“Seems like something that would make them look harder, not less.”_

“Blow it clean off.”

 _“Next idea, Shira,”_ Jennifer said, firmly.

Shira ran her hands through her hair, then threw them up in the air. “I don’t have any!” She stood up again and paced. Five steps, three steps, five steps then she was back to where she began, tracing the same few circles she’d always been tracing. It didn’t help, it never helped, but it felt like it did. A phrase came to mind. Circling the drain. Was that what she was doing?

 _“How about,”_ Jennifer said, casually, too casually, _“you leave?”_

“Desert, you mean,” Shira corrected.

 _“If you want to use those ugly words, by all means.”_ Her joking words belied the gravity of her tone.

“I couldn’t,” she started.

_“Think about it. Really. Do you have a chance of getting out of this without getting thrown into the stockade? If you escape now, what’s to say they aren’t going to find out later and come after you? You’re going to spend your life looking over your shoulder, Shira. Might as well cut it off at the roots.”_

“I can’t just _run_.”

_“You can. The question here is, will you? Also, my ship does not have a single weapon on it. Just so you know. And that plan won’t work, damn it.”_

“I need, I could, maybe if—” She wasn’t sure what she could say, so she filled up space with withered starts of sentences. “I mean—there’s a chance, right?”

 _“A chance.”_ The word in Jennifer’s voice seemed to strip away the hope Shira was grasping at, baring naked the sheer improbability. _“Is that what you’re going to bet your life on?”_

“That’s a huge choice, I can’t just decide that on a whim—”

_“You’re faced with a pretty high choice of getting arrested and court martialed, versus what might happen if you desert, or even defect. I’m not sure how that even measures up.”_

Whatever was left of her stubbornness sputtered and suffocated. “Well, I, I need to prep—Tomorrow. I can go tomorrow.”

_“Time is ticking—”_

“Stop trying to pressure me, Jennifer Cowling,” she snapped, anger flaring out of nowhere. “Tomorrow.”

_“You sure about that?”_

“Yes.”

Silence.

_“Alright. I will be back at oh six hundred local. Be ready.”_

“We’ll see. Out.”

Then she tapped her head against the cool metal of the console and didn’t move until long after the pressure of the Griffin on grid disappeared.

* * *

Preparations. She had to prepare. Even though she’d told Jennifer that she would decide tomorrow, and she technically still hadn’t decided yet. She grudgingly went through her morning routine at three AM, and checked D-scan, and checked the last six hours’ of D-scan logs, tidied up the kitchen and had a cup of hot water and made her bed before finally deciding she really would go look at her ship.

Waiting for the airlock out of the station to cycle was torture, being left alone with her thoughts, not even being able to move in the tight confines. She could always turn back. She hadn’t committed. There was a chance, there was always a chance. If she just didn’t act, then events would run their course and she would swirl right down the drain. The door hissed open.

The short EVA was characterized by carefully locating and moving to the rungs along the outside, up along the primary axis of the station towards the hangar structure that grew out of its surface. The hangar wasn’t pressurized. Any external work would have to be done in EVA, though she could dock her ship to the station for the internals. She visually inspected the exterior. Pristine as the day she’d docked it, without even dust. She teased open an external hatch and plugged in a monitor to the diagnostics port. Engines cold, warp drive cold, and life control flatlined at a cozy minus fifty degrees Celsius. She connected a power umbilical, thick as her arm, pulling it out from a spool and kicking off from the hangar array wall to reach her ship and twisting it into lock position. More things lit up on the display, and she thought she could feel a barely perceptible hum. It was probably her imagination. She activated the warp core startup procedure. Thirty minutes to an hour, stuck in a EVA suit that made every motion at least five times harder than it ought to be. She floated away from her ship and attached herself to a velcro strap on the wall.

She didn’t have anything to distract herself with. Again. Was there anything else she could do? There wasn’t anything to load, because the _Binari_ , her Slicer, used laser weaponry, meaning even in storage she could keep the crystals in the guns. No drones, nothing that could’ve been taken off for repairs and forgotten. She was sure some briefing entry on the Imperial Navy Slicer was inordinately proud that it was practically a solid-state ship, but that fact didn’t help her at all in this moment.

Deep down, and not even that deep, maybe take a shovel to her surface and you’ll hit it barely a meter in, she didn’t believe that staying would be in her best interests. Lee had a chip on his sleeve for her. She had a pretty good chance at getting discovered. It could only be a little treason, yes, in which case she’d only get discharged from the military and live the rest of her life forever planetbound. Even if she wasn’t, if she got by went on with her career—it would be like Jennifer said. Always looking over her shoulder. Never seeing Jennifer there.

Because she enjoyed her talks with Jennifer. She felt a connection, there, something that slipped between protocols of conduct and social standards and even borders, knowing that there was someone she could simply talk to without worrying about politics, like the kind that sent her to the Relay. Someone she _knew_ liked her back, put in the effort to talk. There’s just the little matter of treason. Barely skimming the gap between aiding and abetting, a gap close enough that Lee could slam it shut on her face. Crush her hopes out of a grudge.

She thought of tea, and she thought of the warm feelings adjacent to tea.

The low hum became a proper vibration. A corner of the diagnostics monitor flashed orange. She looked up to see her _Binari_ , navigation lights blinking in the startup sequence, three LEDs on an antenna near the central cockpit cycling blue-green-red-white, and the floodlight mounted above each wing was starting to turn on, the central filament starting to glow. Warming up. She kicked off from the wall again, landed on the diagnostics monitor and popped the hatch, then scrambled to turn off the floodlights before she blinded herself. In a small, primarily metal space like this, the thousand-watt bulbs would bounce off every surface. The damned EVA suit got in the way, and the switches were so tiny and densely packed, but the ones she needed was mounted just under the rim of the hatch and she nudged them with the back of her finger. The lights went out.

She squeezed herself into the cockpit and delicately directed the ship towards the airlock. Thank the heavens that the airlock had a flexible, extending tube to dock her ship to. It took another hour to desuit, cycle, and fill her ship with air from the system. The last thirty minutes, she spent sitting in the cockpit, without the suit, running through checklists. The checklist reminded her that she’d left the diagnostics monitor hooked into the external access port, but she could not motivate herself at all to go through that rigmarole just to remove that monitor. It felt too good to be back in the _Binari_. Every surface was covered in controls, dials and monitors, but they were her controls, dials and monitors. The Relay’s console chafed, while the _Binari_ was an extension of herself. Almost literally, because the systems fed into her implants. It felt like she’d put on a glove. She flexed her fingers, and the ship responded. She circled the Relay effortlessly.

Her instruments gently beeped, and she knew that Jennifer was here. Precisely on time, according to her clock implant. She opened a tight-beam channel, but Jennifer spoke first.

_“Ready to go, ace?”_

She licked her lips. “Mm. I think so.”

Pause. _“I’m surprised, but I can’t say I’m disappointed.”_

“I…” She opened the throttle and felt the _Binari_ ’s twin engines spool up, felt her radar blip slide towards _Personal Gravity Field_ ’s. No acceleration, though, because her ship’s inertial compensators were too fine-tuned for that. The Relay slid away and out of the cockpit view, though its signal return stayed loud and clear. “I thought about it.”

_“And?”_

“Well, you’re right. Of course.”

 _“Naturally,”_ she said, sounding a little wary. _“Is there a but in there?”_

“None at all.” Shira reached up and flicked switches to enable proximity alerts and the autopilot, set to follow the _Field_ at a distance of so many meters and _yes_ , computer, I know that it’s an enemy ship. “I thought about it.”

 _“Well,”_ she said, still sounding dubious, _“I’m glad—”_

“Wait,” Shira sent, feeling a prickle on her implants. “Check D-scan, hauler and two slicers inbound.” The facts clicked into place a second later, and she swore in Imperial Common.

_“I see it alright. Friends?”_

“Let’s go go go, do you have outbound coordinates?”

_“Sending.”_

She piped the coordinates into her navigation and let the autopilot align. The stars whirled above her. “Twenty AU and closing.”

_“How do you find out so quickly?”_

“Implants.”

_“Ah.”_

_Binari_ hummed around her, velocity vector lining up with the out vector on her display. She was aligned. “Ready when you are.”

Before she could stop, Three new contacts dropped onto grid. Their transponder signals caught up with realspace and started streaming into her targeting computer. _Jinhua_ , _Sodeasa_ and a hauler named _RSAH 30_.

 _“Lower Lieutenant Im,”_ Lee said, saying her name and rank like a demand. He was on the hauler.

 _“Warp, warp,”_ Jennifer sent. Her Griffin started gaining superluminal velocity.

_“What in the worlds are you—”_

Last chance. She could still turn back. Or she could try and lie. It wasn’t like she had been telling him the truth. She punched her warp drive and keyed comms. “Engaging the enemy, sir.” The other two Slicers were approaching her, but the warp tunnel was already there. She pulled away after the Griffin.

 _“Binari,_ _abort and return to the Relay,”_ the order came, too late.

“Negative, committed to warp. Going for the intercept.”

 _“Please don’t tell me you’re going to shoot me up,”_ Jennifer said.

“I’m trying to give myself a reasonable excuse,” Shira said, flicking to her comm channel, almost wanting to laugh from the adrenaline pumping through her. Her fingers did not shake as she set the warp drive to plot a tunnel merge with the Griffin.

_“To shoot me?”_

“To follow you.” She checked her D-scan. “I don’t think they’re chasing.”

_“It’s not very convincing of an excuse.”_

“Does it even matter? I’m not going back, it seems. I’m deserting. I’m _defecting_.” The emotions swirled in her, turbulent and threatening to spill over, and she laughed or maybe she choked. “I can’t go back now.”

 _“You shouldn’t need to,”_ she said confidently.

Avionics said, _merge in 15s_. She said, “Maybe they’ll send me right back. No Imps allowed in Protectorate space.”

_“Then I’m coming right after you and we can be pirates in no mans’ land together.”_

She giggled, though she didn’t transmit it. “Is this going to be a double desertation?”

_“Hopefully not.”_

The _Binari_ ’s tunnel superimposed itself with the _Personal Gravity Field’s_ , and her interceptor punctured the wall between the two and slipped into the latter’s. There had been nothing on her tactical map, and now there was the red triangle of the _Field._ A quick computer adjustment changed it to blue. She noted its position relative to her ship, then gently fired attitude thrusters until she had visual through the cockpit hatch. The Griffin was formed primarily of unenthusiastic grey metal plates, a sort of abbreviated sea urchin, antennas awkwardly jutting out of the frigate’s core area and white navigational lights blinking on the end of each one. She thought, she could shoot up the Griffin right here and now and nothing could stop her. Morbid. She felt spooked and decisively diverted power from her weapons.

“So, how about that micro-gee swimming pool in the station,” she said.

_“Buckle in, Shira. It’s going to be a long ride.”_

“I’ll look forward to it,” she said, then she snapped her fingers. “Ah, I didn't pack any tea.”

_“Hah. There will be tea at the station.”_

“It won’t be my tea.”

 _“Get over it,”_ Jennifer said with a laugh.

Shira leaned back and looked up, watching the Griffin against the backdrop of slowly moving stars. “I suppose I will,” she said.

* * *

_Postscript_

> **IH-147 Request for Leave** (Copy, Approved)
> 
> **Submitted by** : Cpt. JENNIFER COWLING
> 
> **Duration** : 2319/02/09 — 2319/02/23 (14 days)
> 
> **Reason** : I need to go see my goddamn girlfriend
> 
> **Comment** : Please be professional, Captain.
> 
> **Comment** : I would like to take a leave of absence for the above dates for reasons of meeting my goddamn girlfriend. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wew. Took six months for part two to get posted. Harbin and Gaia originally looked at this chapter, then I lost steam for half a year. After much pestering from the likes of Cauldron and in particular keira, I decided to just slapdash-out the remaining part of this unfinished chapter without editing it or even looking at it again. Sorry if the quality went down, but I didn’t want this sitting on my conscience.


	11. After EP: falling into the sky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a short snip that Harbin wrote, set after the ending of EP2. It was super cute so I decided to post it ~~against her wishes~~. It is, of course, canon.

”You’re going to spend all day here again?” asked Jennifer.

Shira didn’t open her eyes until Jennifer loomed over her, blocking out the sun. “Hey,” she said, giving Jennifer a wide, stupid smile. “I remember a story about people who lived underground, afraid that they’d fall up into the sky.”

“Hm,” said Jennifer, plopping down next to Shira. She plucked a blade of grass, using her nails to make it into the proper shape for a whistle. Shira watched as Jennifer put the grass to her lips; one blow, and no noise was made, the grass sailing off in spirals until it hit the ground. 

“I could wiggle my toes in the mud and grass forever,” said Shira. 

“I want the ending of the story before you ditch that train of thought,” said Jennifer.

“They went up to the surface and didn’t die,” said Shira. “Unless you’re reading the version my grandmother used to tell. That one has spaceships.”

“Now you have to tell me,” said Jennifer.

And Shira did.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Homecoming](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13570230) by [keira_irl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keira_irl/pseuds/keira_irl)




End file.
